The bookstore scene isn’t what it used to be, but some neighborhood gems still remain. This Black History Month, WNYC’s Community Partnerships Desk is visiting Black-owned bookstores in our region. Dawn Harris Martine owns Grandma’s Place, a children’s book and toy store in Central Harlem.
The transcript of Dawn Harris Martine’s story has been lightly edited for clarity.
My name is Dawn Harris Martine and I’m the owner of Grandma’s Place in Harlem.
I opened Grandma’s Place in 1999. There was a vacant building right next door to my house, and I did not want a laundromat or restaurant in there. So, I decided this community needed a literacy center to teach parents and children to read. I was going to name it the Kindred Literacy Center. But my 7-year-old granddaughter said, ‘no grandma, it’s your place. It should be named grandma’s place.’
Initially, the first five years of the literacy center, that’s all it was, a literacy center. That’s because I was working as a New York City school teacher at the time, and I could only open at three o’clock when I came home from work. But, after five years, they went up on the rent and I decided that I would use the 25,000 volumes of books that I had at my house and open a bookstore. I got some people, but I didn’t get a lot of them. And then I started putting toys and games, educational toys and games along with the books. And that took off.
I am 84 years old. When I grew up as a child, there were no Black positive books to read. I was reading Fun with Dick and Jane and the Three Pigs or whatever, but never saw a positive Black child. The books that I curate and put in the store are positive books of kids overcoming great obstacles and making a name for themselves and living successful lives.
I want to make sure they get a good cross section of the ethnicities and the colors. And it’s not all about Black. It’s Black, brown, yellow. Everybody has a right to be in my bookstore. When kids read a variety of books that…
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