A Cherished Black Bookstore in a Changing South LA

It is usually jazz that plays in the background at Eso Won Books, a cherished independent bookseller in Los Angeles that for almost three decades has catered to African-American readers, but sometimes it is David Bowie, Nirvana or just really loud rock music.

James Fugate came to Los Angeles from Detroit in the late 1980s, and after a short time running the bookstore at Compton College, he and his partners opened their own store in South Los Angeles. The bookstore has been open nearly every day since — only once or twice, in Fugate’s memory, has it closed. Once, he said, was in 2006, when Barack Obama, then a senator, came to town for a book signing and the crowds were too large for his shop to accommodate.

February is Black History Month, and there are still events to catch all over the city — at the Los Angeles Public Library, which is hosting art exhibitions, dance performances and a genealogy workshop; at the California African-American Museum; and the Aquarium of the Pacific, which is hosting a festival this weekend.

And at Eso Won Books, whose space has long been a gathering place for black intellectual life in the Leimert Park neighborhood of South Los Angeles, every month is Black History Month. Two presidents have visited — Obama and Bill Clinton — and Ta-Nehisi Coates has called Eso Won his favorite bookstore in the world. These days the store’s best-selling book is “When They Call You a Terrorist,” by Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter. “Fire and Fury,” the inside look at the Trump White House by Michael Wolff, has also been a big seller.

Yet even as black heritage is being celebrated, there are persistent anxieties over demographic shifts that in recent decades has seen South Los Angeles — although not Leimert Park itself — tilt from a predominantly black area to one dominated by Latinos.

“Anyone that walks through our doors, we are going to help them,” said Fugate, who owns the store with his partner, Tom Hamilton. “If they are Hispanic, and they need something, a book we don’t carry, yeah we’ll be happy to order it for them.” The same goes, he said, for the white woman who visits with a list of mystery books.

Still, he wants to preserve his store’s identity.

“Some people have said we should carry more Latino books,” he said. “But our focus isn’t as a black-Latino store. It’s as a black bookstore.”