RALEIGH

The first Black-owned children’s bookstore in North Carolina will reopen next week after online threats forced its closure earlier this year, and it collected a huge boost from a TikTok influencer to kick off its new chapter.

Liberation Station has relocated to Hill Street near St. Augustine’s University thanks to more than $60,000 raised through a Gofundme campaign, and the store settled in a corner of Southeast Raleigh with deep roots. A few doors down, Sylvester White has operated a family barber shop for 60 years, not far from the Southeast Raleigh house his family has occupied for a century. Both the St. Monica Teen Center and Tarboro Road Community Center sit a few blocks away — anchors in Raleigh’s Black community.

“It feels like a homecoming,” owner Victoria Scott-Miller said. “It just feels right. This is a time of so much polarization in this country. We needed a space.”

Rising to the Occasion

She opened Liberation Station on Fayetteville Street in 2023, aiming to be a place where Black children and adults could see themselves in literature. Each book sold there is written by a Black author and read by both the owners and their children before going on the shelves.

Soon after opening, Scott-Miller reported hate messages and death threats on the bookstore’s phone and on social media, including on the store’s Instagram page. Not wanting her place of refuge to be tainted by that negativity, she announced its departure in April.

The new store on Hill Street feels safer because of the community that surrounds it and the history that makes residents proud, she said. The College Park neighborhood around St. Augustine’s University regularly recognizes its history, celebrates its oldest residents and resists gentrification that strips that away.

“I do think that we’ll have the same sense of security because it’s supported by the community,” Scott-Miller said. “This community has not disappointed in rising to the occasion.”

Lifelong College Park resident and community activist Octavia Rainey called Liberation Station a perfect fit.

“I’m proud of them,” she said. “It is great. They went through a lot being downtown with the discrimination, and I thought that was very sad that in this day and age.”

Sunshine in human form

The fund-raising campaign sought $70,000, nearly all of which has been reached, but nearly half of that total arrived within 24 hours.

The windfall came after Scott-Miller posted a video announcing that Liberation Station will feature both a food pantry and a pad pantry, which the owner explained while holding an armload of tampon packages.

That video got picked up and reposted by TikTok influencer Jen Hamilton, and overnight, donations came pouring in.

“She is sunshine in human form,” Hamilton said of Liberation Station’s owner.

Meanwhile, Scott-Miller said she expects 2,000 people on-hand for the Dec. 29 opening.

“Come in,” she said Tuesday. “This is your space.”