Community Fights To Save A Million Black Books Before Losing Them For Good

A grassroots campaign is racing to preserve one of Britain's largest collections of Black books.

When folks say “protect the culture,” they usually mean music, fashion, or social media trends. But across the pond, advocates are reminding the world that the real receipts are sitting on bookshelves.

A new campaign titled Save Our Stories is mobilizing support to preserve a collection of more than one million Black books believed to be one of the largest archives of Black literature in Britain. The effort comes after the building housing the collection suffered multiple break-ins, raising urgent concerns about the future of decades of Black history, scholarship, and storytelling, reports The Voice.

Veteran Pan-African activist and bookseller Nkrumah Pepukayi is at the center of the #Save1MillionBlackBooks campaign. For more than five decades, Pepukayi has collected books chronicling African, Caribbean, and Black British history, children’s literature, health, politics, and autobiographies. However, he says preserving that legacy has become just as important as building it.

“I have access to over a million books and I can’t even read 10 because I am so busy working. But one thing I can tell you, the more you know, it’s the more you know how little you know,” he told The Voice.

Activists say losing this archive would be bigger than misplaced paperbacks. They argue that it’s about preserving intellectual property, historical records, and the stories mainstream institutions have too often overlooked. That’s why the campaign is seeking to secure and repair the building before the collection can be cataloged, reopened to the public, and eventually made available for browsing and purchase. Black British Book Festival Founder Selina Brown, who is backing the effort, underscored what’s at stake in the campaign video.

“Every single book is here, in London, in the UK and what if I told you this building is under threat, of one million books being lost.” She added, “we cannot lose this, this right here is history and if we lose history, we lose everything.”

According to Pepukayi, reading is one of the greatest tools for liberation.

“It starts with one fact, intelligence rules the world, ignorance carries the burden.”

He also warned against allowing others to define Black history.

“If we don’t record our own story, tell our own story, it will be told by others and twisted to benefit them and to make it out as if we have done nothing. We have to tell our own story and we have a long story, an honest story, a story that we as African people need to know and need to tell others.”

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