Black-Owned

Chapter One

First Officer of the Underground Railroad

I'd never even heard of David Ruggles before I began researching bookstores. And neither have many of the booksellers and book lovers I've spoken to since. The more I read about Ruggles's exciting and radical life, the sadder I became that so few people knew his story. Ruggles was a nineteenth-century abolitionist who helped enslaved people through the Underground Railroad, published anti-slavery pamphlets, and ran the country's first known Black bookstore. This news was unsurprising given what we know about Black people's tenacity and ability to fight systems of oppression in the face of adversity. But I was not prepared to learn the details of his life: the story of a man who weathered racist beatings, an attempted kidnapping, and years of targeted attacks, all for the liberation of his people.

Ruggles was asleep in his home on Chapel Street in Manhattan on December 28, 1836, when he heard loud knocking at his front door. Banging. He rushed to the door to find a group of white men trying to force it open.

"Who is it? Who's there?!" Ruggles demanded. It was the city marshal. He wanted to talk about something very important, he said. It was between 1 and 2 a.m.

Ruggles wasn't a fool. His work as an abolitionist, peddling anti-slavery literature and spurring crowds of Black New Yorkers with electrifying speeches, made him a consistent target for men like the ones outside his door. Men who were more than happy to comply with a federal order to capture runaway slaves who made it to free states and return them to their masters in the South. Ruggles knew their MO: arrest an unsuspecting Black person, haul them to jail, put them in front of a judge without a jury, and have them sold into captivity. He told the city marshal to come back at a decent hour. The marshal, and his gang, stormed off. But Ruggles knew they'd return. This marshal, D. D. Nash, was among a group of local police who gleefully kidnapped Black men, women, and children and sold them into slavery in the South. Nash, along with Tobias Boudinot and the countless city officials who shared a disdain for Black people, terrorized New York's Black populace. Ruggles knew Nash very well, and he knew he was in trouble. Ruggles had recently published an article letting the public know about a newly docked slave ship in New York and its captain. The story caused an uproar and local kidnappers, who supported the captain, wanted revenge. Nash soon returned with his crew, this time bringing the equally notorious police chief Jacob Hays. They forced their way into Ruggles's home, drawing guns and knives on the hysterical landlady. They lunged for Ruggles and tried to grab him, making their problem with him clear: "We will learn him to publish us as kidnappers!" Ruggles narrowly escaped. It wasn't his first quarrel with kidnappers, and it wouldn't be his last. By this time, in 1836, Ruggles had developed a reputation as a charismatic abolitionist who could inspire almost any crowd to action. He'd opened the nation's first-known Black bookstore just two years earlier, in May 1834, as a home for both anti-slavery literature and his activism. Ruggles's shop was located at 67 Lispenard Street, in what is now known as Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood. It sat in the elite St. John's Park neighborhood, a Madison Avenue-esque shopping headquarters filled with wealthy white people, many of whom shared anti-slavery sentiments-including the Tappan brothers, Lewis and Arthur, who helped bankroll the Anti-Slavery Society.

But the bookstore wasn't far from New York's Five Points neighborhood, a working-class area of Black, German, and Irish communities. Five Points was consumed by poverty, which many outsiders equated with crime and debauchery. The prevailing image of Five Points as a slum where one would certainly need a police escort reflected the biases people held toward the poor and working-class population. Ruggles made it his goal to reach as many people in Five Points as possible, in addition to serving residents in the Fifth and Sixth Wards. As Ruggles immersed himself in New York's abolitionist scene, it became clear to everyone he encountered that not only was he unafraid of going places known for danger-he intended to. Ruggles sold anti-slavery and anti-colonization publications to customers for as little as twenty-five cents per month. He considered his shop an intervention for young Black people who needed community and an educational home. To Ruggles, knowledge was vital for developing what he believed was the moral virtue necessary to thrive in society. And his shop, and later the accompanying reading room, was a site of "observation, reading and reflection." He wrote of his high hopes for the business, telling the public in an advertisement that a "centre of literary attraction for young men whose mental appetites thirst for food" would keep them from the "allurement of vice which surrounded them on every side."

This wasn't Ruggles's first foray into bookselling, though, or running a business in general. He'd been exposed to entrepreneurship since he was a child. Born in Connecticut to free parents, Ruggles was one of eight children. His father was a respected blacksmith and his mother a renowned cook in their town of Bean Hill, about a mile from the center of Norwich, Connecticut. His parents instilled in him a deep pride and strong work ethic, both of which would come to characterize his life as an activist. Though the family was poor, they lived in a small, close-knit, elite society that produced congressmen and senators. He was surrounded by abolitionists or those who, at the very least, questioned the morality of slavery. From an early age, Ruggles was aware of the evil of the slave trade and lived an integrated childhood, going to school and frequently playing with white people. Ruggles later wrote fondly of his formative years, in which he swam, climbed trees, and went ice-skating with his friends. By the time he was a teenager, Ruggles had a sturdy education, strong abolitionist politics, and a sense of self-respect and esteem modeled by his parents. He saw militant Black abolitionism during his teen years as a mariner before moving to New York at age seventeen with some cash in hand, ready to join Black New York's lengthy history of anti-slavery efforts.

In Norwich, he was exposed to small businesses like grocery shops, lending libraries, and bookshops that published weekly newspapers. When he was eighteen years old, Ruggles followed suit in his new home, opening a grocery shop at 1 Cortlandt Street in Lower Manhattan, in the heart of the city's central business district. There he sold "butter and books," and hired a pair of brothers who'd escaped slavery to help him run the store. Although the neighborhood didn't boast a large Black population, Ruggles advertised to Black communities through notices in Freedom's Journal, the nation's first Black-owned-and-operated newspaper, and delivered groceries to "any part of the city." He stocked the store with goods from other free Black people, supporting the free produce movement that boycotted goods made by enslaved people.

Eventually, anger at Ruggles's success boiled over. Someone broke into the store and "after taking $280, various articles, and destroying others, attempted to set the place on fire," according to a December 1829 report in the New-York Spectator.

A watchman was able to put out the fire, but the store was destroyed. It was a setback for Ruggles-the journalist wrote that Ruggles's "prospects ha[d] been totally blighted"-but it was by no means his end. Dejected, Ruggles took a break from entrepreneurship and dove into the abolitionist movement. He worked as an agent, delivering speeches and organizing other abolitionists, for The Emancipator, an anti-slavery newspaper. It was a dangerous endeavor: traveling across the Northeast to meet with activists, publishers, and white people sympathetic to the abolitionist movement. There was joy and passion in Ruggles's work, sure, and he would need it to get through moments where his life and well-being were under attack. One night in January 1834, while traveling from New York City to Newark, New Jersey, a stagecoach driver wouldn't let Ruggles ride inside with the white passengers even though he'd bought a ticket like everyone else. Ruggles refused to ride outside in the cold like the driver ordered. The driver roughed him up before he and the white passengers banded together to push Ruggles out of the stagecoach and into the street. Ruggles had experienced similar violence before, but it still hurt, nonetheless. Battered and angry, Ruggles could have turned around and gone home to lick his wounds. But he chose to continue, walking to Newark in the cold instead. This only made Ruggles even more passionate; though born a free man in the North, he felt an even deeper connection to Black people in the South.

After a year traveling as an activist, he was inspired to ditch the groceries and focus solely on literature for his next business venture, a bookstore. William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, as well as The Emancipator, praised the new bookstore and publicized Ruggles's efforts in enough articles to draw both the curiosity of New York's Black community and the ire of ardent racists. Slavery advocates immediately hated Ruggles, working to sully his name, and one even called his store an "incendiary depot" in an 1835 public notice, writing, "Let him be Lynched!" Ruggles's vision for America's first Black bookstore-whether he knew it was the first-is one still recognizable in bookstores today. That is, it was never just a bookstore. It was inherently a site that enunciated a pattern of Black activism and prioritized community. Understanding the scandal of a Black bookstore during the burgeoning abolitionist movement of the early 1800s means understanding the circumstances in which Black people lived at the time. Anti-literacy laws barred enslaved people from learning to read or write and made it a crime for people to teach them. Black people in the South were largely unable to travel, assemble in groups, or found churches, schools, or social groups. They could be jailed, beaten, branded, or killed for breaking any of the numerous restrictions implemented to enforce social control.

Reading, writing, loitering, "vagrancy," and showing public affection were among the long list of these regulations. Black people in Northern cities weren't allowed to use public libraries or participate in white-run literary activities-and risked their safety and freedom if they tried. This inequity would persist well into the twentieth century. In the North, where free Black people were somewhat active participants in American society, Black individuals largely lived in poverty, suffered severe illness, and had shorter life expectancies. They were also at near-constant risk of kidnappers like D. D. Nash. In the midst of all this: a Black bookstore. Historians say Ruggles's bookstore was likely a central location for the rising young Black people who graduated from the African Free School. Any educated Black person in New York City in the 1830s likely stopped at the store.

The space demanded that Black people gather, read, and learn-all acts that were still largely forbidden in many parts of the country and, therefore, inherently radical. The riots that Ruggles faced as he opened-and reopened-his store were by no means unusual. Simmering racial tensions caused New York to frequently erupt in violence, as leaders in the slave-owning South worked hard to squash abolitionism. Of course, literacy and the distribution of radical literature played a key role in the conflict. In 1835, then-President Andrew Jackson even banned the US Postal Service from delivering any pro-abolition publications in the South. Hatred of abolition stretched across racial lines, too. Just a few years earlier, in 1833, a white student was publicly whipped in Nashville, Tennessee, for simply having abolitionist writing with him as he traveled. Another white man, the abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah P. Lovejoy, was persecuted for his publication's writing in the early 1830s. A few years later, he would be murdered by a white mob in Alton, Illinois.

For Ruggles and those who fiercely opposed slavery, abolition was just as much about combating the institution through writing and speeches as it was helping enslaved people one by one. Abolitionists of the time understood that even the most peaceful anti-slavery efforts could lead to their deaths-even something as simple as selling abolitionist literature in a bookstore. Ruggles mainly sold abolitionist pamphlets and journals in the store, along with a sprinkling of books. He also sold stationery and paper supplies, and he bound books. Just a few steps from pamphlets by Maria Stewart, a Black woman abolitionist and women's rights activist, visitors could find Lydia Maria Child's all-but-banned anti-slavery collection, The Oasis. The store had a printing press and Ruggles put it to use, publishing his own pamphlets about abolition. Black people who couldn't read or write would come into the store begging Ruggles to help them write letters and make sense of legal documents. Ruggles diligently pored over them. Some were wills from white people who left property to their Black servants, only to have family members try to cheat them out of it. This was the only place of its kind in New York. Just one year after he opened the bookstore, a mob of angry white people set his office, just feet away from his store, on fire. A week later, a racist mob camped outside the burned office for three nights to intimidate Ruggles and anyone looking to buy his books or seek his services. Local anti-abolitionist newspapers reported on the fire with articles full of joy and implied threats.

But none of this stopped Ruggles. He turned to The Liberator, writing a notice of his own. He condemned the attacks on his character and offered the public $50 for any information leading to a conviction of the person (or people) who set fire to his store and $25 to anyone who could name even one of the men who had gathered in the mob outside his office. These were bold words for a free Black man in a city crawling with white people happily plucking Black people off the street and shipping them into bondage. A few years later, in 1838, Ruggles expanded his store to include a reading room. Around the city, the numerous existing reading rooms only allowed white people and most catered to an all-male clientele. Ruggles's reading room existed alongside a string of literary societies that Black people founded in the 1800s as places for Black development and education, with some specifically dedicated to Black women. They were in direct opposition to major white societies, some even run by progressives, and libraries that shut Black people out. Ruggles openly complained about the segregation. Black people deserved "access to the principal daily and leading anti-slavery papers, and other popular periodicals of the day," he reasoned. And he was determined to provide them with just that.