The Black Section at WalMart; Segregating Titles by Subjects’ Skin Color

we get asked for our “black section” all the time
…by African-Americans. we say there is no specific black section, that all books are by subject or author and they don’t seem happy about it.

Walmart is probably just giving people what they want: “The book sections in our stores are designed to meet customer demand…”

There have been times when our library patrons have been so incensed by our lack of a black section that I thought their complaints would cause administration to give in and change the library layout.

another library
we are also bombarded by requests for an “african-american” section. when we explain that we do not separate books on the basis of the authors’ skin color, we get hostility from those asking. we also get frequent requests from people who want “a list of black authors” b/c they don’t want to read anything that isn’t written by or about blacks. so don’t get mad at wal-mart. the racism is not on their part, but on the part of black shoppers who only want to read books by and for blacks.

Waldenbooks
I worked at a Waldenbooks for a few years starting in 2001. We had an African American section there. It was mostly made up of fiction and poetry works by black authors. The location of the store had a large black/African American population, so the section was very popular. Nobody ever said they were offended by the section’s existence. A Latino/Latina section probably would have been equally as popular.

Anyway, it seems like the only person offended by the black section at Walmart is the author of the article. Nobody else seems to be upset about it. Seems like a non-issue to me…

Former African American Book Store Owner
As an avvid reader, I specifically enjoyed reading books by and about black characters. Back in the late 80’s and 90’s such books were very hard to find in your average book store in the Chicagoland . If you were looking for a particular book, it had to be ordered. The only place that I could fine a great selection was a Border’s Book store in Indianpolis in an “African-American” section. Everytime I would visit Indianapolis, I would gravitate to the store and load up with 5 – 10 books. My wife would give me her own list.

I started my own business, BLACK TITLES, in 1994 and would travel with my family to specific events like Black Expos in the midwest. We would carry up to 500 different titles and ALWAYS did very well at the big events. I would venture to say we did just as well or better than every other book vendor at the annual Printer’s Row Book Fair in Chicago. Our approach was to bring as many black titles we could afford to bring, organized neatly by category, with a professional presentation, and a knowledgable staff. If someone needed recommendations for good children’s books, my 10 year old son was the expert! He’d read them all. It was classic niche marketing I had studied at DePaul University’s MBA program.

Black college educated women were our best customers. Fiction by women authors was the best selling catagory followed by pre-school children’s books. We had an independent author, Crystal McCollum, that would join us and sell up to 400 copies of her books at a single event. Michael Basiden, the syndicated radio personality, sold his first self published book, “Why Men Cheat” with us at Printer’s Row Book Fair when he was still driving trains for the Chicago Transit Authority.

The 90’s was a great period for black authors. Terry MacMillian single-handedly stimulated the demand and opened the door for Tina McElroy Ansa and others. Even before “Waiting to Exhale”, Terry’s books “Disappearing Acts” and “Mama” always sold out. If a book got banned ( April Owen’s “Coffee Will Make You Black”) or stirred controversy (Secret Relations Between Blacks & Jews), it was very good for business.

There was tight network of Black Book Store owners and Distributors (Lushena, A&B Books, D&J Books) that stretched from New York to LA. There was a Black Book store owner’s forum at the annual Amerian Booksellers Association meeting where store owners collaborated and shared experiences. Black authors would clamor to sign books at black owned stores and events.

I learned much from Desiree Saunders of Afrocentric Book Store in Chicago and Robert & Jeff of Underground Book Store in the Hyde Park neighborhood. We would shared tips, bought books together in volume, and took advanatage of each others credit and credibility.

The demise of this network came from two changes in the marketplace: AMAZON.com and traditional discount stores.

Amazon.com hit the online market with books discounted up to 40%. We looked at the online selling approach earlier and determined the financials did not make sense. The additional labor and costs required to create and maintain a web site, select, package, and ship product could hardly cover a product with a fixed seller discount (40% – 45%) and fixed maximum retail price. After losing millions of dollars hidden in financial reports that read like mumbo-jumbo, Amazon.com came to realize the financials did not make sense either.

Lastly, it was the WalMarts that put the final nail in the coffin. With their large footprint and low margins, they too saw the market for African American titles. Everyone in the industry finally realized that Black folks do read and are driven by the same marketing parameters as everyone else: price, product, place and promotion. Give the customer a PRODUCT they demand at a reasonable PRICE at a convenient PLACE with the proper PROMOTION or in short in an “African American” section and you will be succesful.

Sorry to tell you author, that is just the nature of the business.

I am no longer in the business. In fact, I have always been employed in the telephony industry even while we ran a book business. I have no regrets. I literally have fond dreams at night of selling books at our BLACK TITLES booth. I enjoyed the hell out of it!

My kids learned a lot and met a lot of intersting people in the process. We sold books to and met Michael Jackson’s mother, Andre 3000 of OutKast, Tichina Arnold and Tisha Campbell of the Martin Lawrence Show, Dave Winfield, Bob Gibson, Rita Dove, and Sonia Sanchez. We even had this guy name Barack Obama show up at our booth at Printer’s Row and discretely sign the single copy of his book I had on the table for a patron. I missed it! My son told me about it when he saw the same guy running for PRESIDENT!

Byron D. Johnson
[email protected]