Black-owned children’s bookstore in North Carolina is closing over alleged threats

By Megan Cerullo, CBS

The owner of a Black-owned children’s bookstore in Raleigh, North Carolina, said she is closing its doors less than a year after it opened because of violent threats. 

The store, called Liberation Station Bookstore, was the first of its kind in the community, owner Victoria Scott-Miller wrote in an Instagram post announcing that it is shuttering its first and only retail location. 

She described how challenging it was to reconcile “the immense joy” she experienced serving the community with “threats of violence,” including death threats and hate mail that she believed imperiled the store and put her family’s safety at risk. 

In a particularly startling incident, she wrote on Instagram, a caller detailed what her son was wearing while he was alone at the shop, she said. 

“For the past 8-months we’ve struggled with the immense joy of serving our community and the many blessings we’ve received that allowed us to continue powering this work forward and our experiences with the unsettling reality of facing threats of violence and emotional harm from those who remain nameless and faceless,” Scott-Miller wrote on Instagram. 

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