Ramunda Young discusses her entrepreneurial journey to launch her online bookstore featuring books affirming Black experiences.
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Ramunda Lark Young, Founder of Mahogany Books
In this interview from December 2024, Director of Marketing Carolyn Woodard talks with Ramunda Lark Young about her journey from growing up in Tulsa Oklahoma to working in Washington DC to founding an online Black bookstore during the 2007-2008 recession.
In addition to a website where you can find curated lists of books to fit any interest, Mahogany Books now has 2.25 in-person stores in DC and hosts author events and a podcast.
What did it take for Ramunda to believe in her vision of owning a bookstore where Black Books Matter, and how did she follow that vision to success?
What does Ramunda do to stay grounded and mentally healthy, and what lessons has she learned on this journey about the importance of seeing ourselves celebrated in the communities around us?
We know nonprofits are facing challenges in a challenging time, and we could all use a little inspiration. Join Carolyn and Ramunda for a few minutes to talk about books, entrepreneurship, and community.
Presenters
Ramunda Lark Young is Co-Founder and Co-owner of Mahogany Books online and with 2.25 locations in Washington DC, including National Harbor, National Airport, and a new location in Anacostia. Unapologetically Black-owned, family-run and operated, Mahogany Books is a local independent bookstore that believes in social entrepreneurship. They take a leadership role in the African American community by promoting reading, writing, and cultural awareness as tools to improve self-esteem, self-love and ultimately our communities to enrich the lives of motivated individuals.
With over 20 years of combined retail book industry experience, Ramunda has witnessed a variety of market highs and lows which helped develop a bookstore model capitalizing on technology while staying true to the independent community bookstore roots that define the core values of the owners.
Carolyn Woodard is currently head of Marketing and Outreach at Community IT Innovators. She has served many roles at Community IT, from client to project manager to marketing. With over twenty years of experience in the nonprofit world, including as a nonprofit technology project manager and Director of IT at both large and small organizations, Carolyn knows the frustrations and delights of working with technology professionals, accidental techies, executives, and staff to deliver your organization’s mission and keep your IT infrastructure operating. She has a master’s degree in Nonprofit Management from Johns Hopkins University and received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Williams College.
She was happy to interview Ramunda Lark Young before the Community IT Innovators staff and is happy to share this interview with our podcast audience.
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Transcript
Carolyn Woodard: Welcome everyone to the Community IT Innovators Technology Topics Podcast. I’m Carolyn Woodard, your host, and today I have a special treat for you, a little departure from our usual IT topics. I want to share an interview I did in December with Ramunda Lark Young, the founder and co-owner of Mahogany Books in Washington DC and online.
I was interested to hear about her entrepreneurial journey in online technology in the world of selling books by Black authors and about the Black experience. You can find them at mahoganybooks.com.
Community IT is proud of our history supporting the Washington DC community, and we are always looking for ways to celebrate the diversity of our staff and our hometown, even as we now work with nonprofits across the United States.
We know nonprofits are facing a lot of stress and challenges right now. The nonprofit sector is used to facing challenges and overcoming the odds. I hope this interview will help you de-stress and refocus on making your vision reality, whatever your vision of a better world may be.
Let’s celebrate inspiration where we find it.
Unapologetically Black owned, family run and operated, Mahogany Books is a local independent bookstore that believes in social entrepreneurship. They take a leadership role in the African American community by promoting reading, writing and cultural awareness as tools to improve self-esteem, self-love and ultimately our communities to enrich the lives of motivated individuals.
Mahogany Books was founded in 2007 as an online bookstore and now has two physical locations in DC in Anacostia and National Harbor.
Ramunda, could you please tell us about yourself as a way to introduce our staff to your background and what led you to create a Black bookstore? Did you grow up in DC, and what was your childhood like?
Ramunda Lark Young: Oh, good questions. First of all, good afternoon. I am excited to be in front of you. It’s just an honor and Carolyn, it’s been a joy to meet you and connect with you and to chat with you.
A little bit about me, I am proud to be from Tulsa, Oklahoma. I have been in the DC area now for about 25, 26 years. I grew up in Tulsa. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Black Wall Street, and it’s in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you’re not familiar with it, great too. I love this conversation.
So, I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It’s the home of Black Wall Street, and Black Wall Street was this economic hub of businesses that were created by Black people. Innovations like anything that you can think of almost. But there was this hub in a community built around Black owned hospitals, Black owned barbershops, and ballrooms, and cleaners, and everything there.
I grew up in Tulsa, where the home of Black Wall Street was. And I didn’t know Black Wall Street was even there, because it was never taught in my books.
So, you think of this amazing economic area that was never talked about in my high school, that was just a few miles down the street.
I grew up there and had an amazing time. I grew up with amazing friends, but I was never really exposed to Black books growing up. And so, I went on to attend Langston University. It’s an HBCU that’s in Oklahoma, I’m a very proud alum of Langston and studied business there, in retail management, and then moved to DC.
Actually, I was interviewed and the company asked, well, where would you want to work? And I was like, DC. And they’re like, we’re here in Oklahoma, but you want to move all the way across the country to DC? And I said, yes, absolutely. I had visited DC a couple of summers in advance and had done internships there and here.
And so, all those things, me growing up not being exposed to Black books, but then having this voracious appetite for, when I got to college, it was like, oh my gosh, I didn’t even know this existed. My husband, who is from DC, grew up with tons of Black bookstores in his community. It was the opposite for him. It’s all he knew. And so, growing up, Black Wall Street, a couple of miles in my neighborhood, never knew it was there. It was about a mile or two from my house.
But when I fast forward and think about Black books and the importance of Black books, and how I never wanted another child to not know about history or the great accomplishments and triumphs that Black people had created, I was like, oh my gosh, how do we create something for that?
And my husband and I would sit here and be like, well, it was my husband’s great idea. And I was like, yeah, let’s do that.
And funny story is, I’ve worked in retail. I’ve done, like I said, my company moved me to DC. I started actually with JCPenney, kind of went up the ranks with them. And then when they closed, they asked if we wanted to take it to another JCPenney. And I said, no, this was fun, but no. And so, Books allowed me to still be in retail.
I then went on to work at a bookstore chain here in the DC area called Caribou Books. It was the world’s largest black owned bookstore chain. We had about six stores and I was over operations. And so that was fun.
But my first foray into books was at Howard University. And Howard University had an independent bookstore. Now it’s at Barnes and Noble, but it was once like Mahogany Books. It was an independent bookstore. So that was my first foray into books.
Coupled with my knowledge of books from college, and my first bookstore job was at Howard University, the dream came from that. It combined retail, it combined my love of books, and it combined my love of culture and community. So, books have been something that I’ve been passionate about, even though this was my husband’s great idea.
But it’s funny that I’ve had the journey in books. I’ve worked at the big box bookstores, Barnes & Noble, and did community relations for them for several years. So, all these little things that I’ve been doing, never thinking that I would own a bookstore one day. So, it’s just funny how your path goes. I had a dear friend that says, all the dots in your journey, you don’t know how they’re going to connect.
Never knowing that retail, never thinking moving to DC, meeting my husband in DC, and here we are with the bookstore 17 years later. So that’s a little bit of a roundabout way about some of my experience and how I grew up a little bit.
Carolyn Woodard: I love that you said that about the dots connecting, as I have a friend who says they always connect, you yourself are the connection.
So, you started Mahogany Books, my understanding is, as an online bookstore. Can you talk a little bit about that? Your husband had the idea and you liked it and you had the experience and then what happened next?
Ramunda Lark Young: Yeah, absolutely. So, at that time we were in our one-bedroom apartment in Alexandria, Virginia. And tossing around what kind of business ideas, we just really wanted to make an impact at that time, more than what we were doing at our jobs, and we had great jobs, we were enjoying it. But something else was saying, how do we create something deeper and richer? And so, we thought about books, we thought about a barber shop, that’s not my thing, but we landed at books.
And so, in Alexandria, when we started, we just had an idea and a dream. And at that time, just a one little laptop computer had no idea about how to create a website. And if you recall 2007, 2008 was, we were in deep the recession time. So here we are trying to create a dot com and we have no dot com experience, just a dot idea, I would say, but just a passion to put books in people’s hands.
I do want to backtrack and say the other impetus for creating Mahogany Books was, I really wanted black books to be accessible to people no matter where they lived. I did not have that access. Online allowed us with the lowest overhead, we didn’t have to pay at lease for a store, we didn’t have tons of employees and workmen, all these different things that come with when you have a physical store, it was just us, a laptop, a dream, and our one-bedroom apartment at that time.
The biggest reason going online for us was, how do we have the biggest impact, the farthest reach with the lowest amount of capital outlay? And online allowed us to reach people in all corners of the United States that we would never otherwise get to see. And so that’s how it started.
And then I will tell you, procrastination kind of set in. It would have probably started in 2005. But the first two years we were like, we don’t know anything about online. What are we doing? How are people going to find us on that one little corner of the internet? How are they going to discover Black books by Mahogany Books?
All of that thinking kind of paralyzed us from executing. And for two years, we just kind of kept going around, oh, what are we doing? We don’t know how to do this. I had a dear friend, MBA, you know, from Duke. She’s like, you know, what are you waiting for? Just hang your shingle out there. And even if it’s not perfect, just start perfecting it along the way.
And so that’s what we did. We just took that leap. We had a lot of different, you know, feelers out there. At that point, I had been working in books. Like I said, I worked at Howard and had worked at Barnes & Noble, all those places, and then took the leap.
And you should have seen our faces when the first little book sale came in at midnight.
And there’s nothing like that feeling in the world, to have a dream, to have an idea, to doubt yourself, and then to execute in somebody else, catch on to that dream and buy in to you.
So that’s kind of how we started, but making books accessible no matter where you live, was the reason that we started online, and the low capital that was required was the way to go.
Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, because you don’t have inventory, you don’t have to explore anything, you can just ship it when someone orders it.
Ramunda Lark Young: Exactly.
Carolyn Woodard: That makes sense. But then you did open a physical store, and now you have two branches, is that right?
Ramunda Lark Young: So I say we have like 2.15, right? The 0.15 is in National Airport, we’re inside of a store called The Good. So, we’ve been there for about a year, and Concourse D near American Airlines, just a little plug.
I say that’s the 0.15 because it’s not fully, you won’t walk by and see Mahogany Books outside, but we are in the airport there.
And then National Harbor, we opened up in the middle of the pandemic in 2021, which, why are we doing that? We seem to have a thing, with 2007, 2008 recession, here we are in the middle of pandemic when people are not shopping outside and we’re opening up a physical store.
Our other location that was in Anacostia was our first physical location. We just closed that one at the end of August to go to a place where we can relocate and expand. So, we just need more room. That one was our first store. We were there for seven years. It was only 500 square feet. And we want to go and expand to a bigger place in a more high traffic location. So that’s what we’re doing now.
Carolyn Woodard: That’s a great problem to have, right?
Ramunda Lark Young: Absolutely.
Carolyn Woodard: You said, you know, it’s crazy to be opening an in-person store in the middle of the pandemic, but you also have in-person events and also some online events, like author events.
I’ve been listening to your podcast, which I recommend to everybody. It’s really just so interesting, such interesting conversations.
What led you to create those opportunities as well for people to meet the authors or to talk about these topics and books?
Ramunda Lark Young: Yeah, absolutely. It doesn’t matter what race you are, when you get to meet someone and learn how they think, how they process, what led them to do A, B, or C, or D. Oftentimes, a light bulb can go off in your own head about things you may be going through or processing.
So for us, it was from the beginning of creating Mahogany Books, it was paramount that we were in position to create these experiences where those thought leaders would be in front of people who, you know, often otherwise may not even have that encounter.
In Anacostia, where 97% of the population is Black, is Hispanic, bringing those high-profile celebrities and authors right there to that community for us was just kismet because we knew how powerful those conversations could be, those experiences. That’s always been a part of our model, having those, I call them sacred spaces.
A lot of times there’s topics that we feel maybe nervous about talking about publicly. And here we are with a thought leader who has written extensively on those topics, and we can ask them questions live and in person.
For little kids to see an author and read about them and now have them there, that leaves an indelible mark on them.
So for us, having those experiences were crucial.
And then in walks the pandemic, and we’re like, well, how do we create these experiences now when everybody is isolated and at home? And we started at that point doing virtual events. We were probably the first black owned bookstore to do those. And it only came out of necessity. We had a big high-profile celebrity and tickets were sold. And we’re like, how do we, what do we do now? And so, our thought was, how do we do it virtually? How do we, everybody’s at home? How do we get to find a platform that, and it wasn’t … Zoom is Zooming now, right? Back in the beginning of the pandemic, it was not like it is now, there were a lot of different things out there. And so, we found a platform that a lot of people had started to use during that time of the pandemic and it worked for us.
It was just another moment when I think of people being isolated, Black, White, whoever you are, now are not in communication, not in community with each other. And at that time, when you think about what was happening in the world and not have a person that you could maybe bounce ideas off of that you may not even be experiencing.
There were a lot of books that were coming out that dealt with race and race and how always has, not just in the pandemic. And so, for us online, allowed us to still have those intimate, I say intimate, some of our calls had 2000 people from all over the world watching and chatting about a topic and that we were able to still keep that kind of community going.
So even now, four years later, we still have some virtual events with some authors, because now they can talk from their home, like where I am now, and still have those conversations without traveling. So for us, events have been huge.
The other thing I just want to add, so not just the author talks, but even in person, when we think about creating community, we would host workshops on financial literacy, how to write a book, how to publish a book, how to become an entrepreneur. And not just looking at a person as just a reader, but as a holistic person, how do you have ideas that really are important to you in a space that you can learn more about?
Entrepreneurship was a series that we had out there and hosted events. So not just book talks, but just other things such as how to cook healthy, how to brand yourself. So, all these different things are what we host in our stores as well. It’s a robust programming schedule. I don’t know how we do it sometimes, but I know we’ll keep doing it because of how important it is.
Carolyn Woodard: Phil asked, he said he’s curious to hear about the airport. How do you showcase how unique Mahogany Books is, that it’s not just another airport bookstore?
Ramunda Lark Young: Ooh, Phil, that’s a great question. So great question and something we thought about really wholeheartedly. How do we – not throw shade on Hudson News or whoever else, right? But for us, I know for me when I travel, if there is a book, like I love the book Asada by Asada Shakur. But when I travel, there’s no airport in the entire, and I say entire because I’ve traveled a lot, but there may be a store somewhere I don’t know about.
That’s a book – Asada – that I felt like people should have access to, but it’s not in the airport.
We were very intentional about the list of books that we were curating, not one that you can get everywhere. We have those books too. But if you wanted to have Asada Shakur, or if you wanted to have a Langston Hughes or Booker T. Washington book, then that would differentiate us.
The other thing in the people that we partnered with, there’s a, I don’t want to say a kiosk, it’s much grander and much more intelligent than just a kiosk. But there’s an apparatus in the store that when you touch the book, it automatically puts up information about the book and testimonials. So, you may just touch it, and I say touch it, when you reach for it, it automatically populates on that big screen there at the kiosk is what it’s called, but it’s more intelligent than that. But that differentiates us than just scanning the shelf. You now can pick this up and you get a visual testimonial of what the book could be about.
But for us, what differentiates us is just the inventory alone. We have our Black Books Matter shirts in there and mugs, so a lot of things that you wouldn’t see in all the other airport stores. So that really differentiates us as well as our curated list of books there.
Carolyn Woodard: So I’m interested in the business model. Where is the inventory stored? Is it outsourced or do you do it? Who does the shipping? How do you manage credit card transactions? Those sorts of things.
Ramunda Lark Young: When you go to our website, the back end is what we put together that links to the inventory to the world’s largest distributors. So those books we can get, you put it in your basket, they ship out, so we don’t have to hold inventory.
There are items that those distributors and publishers don’t have, that we source from Black publishers, and there’s some Black publishers who’ve been around maybe 40 or 50 years, that the works that they carry means something of importance to us. And so even if the wholesaler doesn’t have it, or the other publishers don’t have it, we want to have it in our stores. They were titles that have been impactful for us and our community for lots of years.
So that’s part of our model too, where we do source from other places. But, and then the other place is, we have a warehouse in Atlanta that we just came on board for us probably a year and a half ago. It’s a black owned company. A lot of those titles that I was just talking about that are not at those main publishers, they facilitate those for us. Our shirts that are not available anywhere else, they ship those out for us. Candles that we brand and create on our own.
So, we’ve got a lot of little things. This little one-bedroom apartment thing has turned into a whole seven figure craziness that has just been a gift to us that we could serve the community in that way.
Carolyn Woodard: One of the podcasts I listened to, you were talking to a couple of academic authors about Black women’s history and their book. And then they mentioned a lot of authors and more academic work that was very impactful to them, and that was very important to them.
Ramunda Lark Young: Absolutely. We work with university presses too. They’re very academic, heavy, a lot of historical texts. So yeah, we work with tons of publishers in the industry.
We just want to put books that are written by black authors into people’s hands. And so having to be creative of where they are sometimes is fun to kind of discover, and curate those lists. But yes, we do academic titles are something that are definitely part of our mix as well.
We did a big survey of our customers, and they are from PhD all the way down to little elementary school kids, right? So having the range of titles is important to us.
We’re a full-fledged bookstore. We don’t just have historical books, but we have cookbooks and health books and poetry, but all from the lens of a Black person’s perspective and Black person’s journey.
I would say maybe one or two percent of books in our stores are not by Black people. But it is their take on that experience. A lot of times there’s other people who have talked and interviewed people that they can now write that story about too. But I would say maybe one percent, two is really high, but we really want that perspective to come from a Black person.
Because the other thing is, I can go to Target and get a book, I can go to Costco, I can go all these places, but I may not see Asada there. I may not see these other books and these other perspectives there. For whatever reason, maybe they don’t feel like it’ll make enough money or it’s not profitable for them or whatever that is.
But for us, we’ve said, no, we want to take the time and say, we’re going to curate this, we want to make this book accessible, because we know it’s that important to have this piece of history, this piece of information readily available to whomever wants, and not just Black people.
Some people come in our stores like, is it okay to come in here? I’m like, it’s a bookstore. You are definitely welcome. You are definitely encouraged to come in because it’s American history, a lot of it is. I want to go off my soapbox there, but it’s Black people’s history.
Carolyn Woodard: Being in DC and making this choice to be here with your bookstore, how did Mahogany Books react to the events of that summer of 2020, the pandemic, the murder, the protests? I imagine that you were sought after for your perspective on what was going on.
Ramunda Lark Young: Wow, that’s a good question, Carolyn. It was such a crazy time.
When I think of 2020, in March, we are all at home, we’re in the middle of a pandemic. So, our lives have shifted even from that perspective. Like, how do we go get our groceries? Is there enough toilet paper on this job? I mean, it was just crazy for people, period.
And then in May, ushers in this, you know, this next, the murder of George Floyd. Both of those, you know, for us, to answer part of your question, how do we handle it?
The first part was just the pandemic. Actually, I’ll back up. My husband and I got creative. Like, how do we now put books into people’s hands? Kids are out of school, it’s March, it’s April. And people are looking for books to entertain their kids.
And so, we kind of start putting together these bundles, like an elementary school bundle, a middle school bundle. So if you’re at home, your parent now can click on this, this bundle and then we can ship it right to them. So, we were kind of rocking and rolling in that.
Then it got a little crazy because with the pandemic, there was short staff at the post office, there were short staff at the publisher, in the warehouse, people were sick at the warehouses, the big distribution center, that I was saying that is the world’s largest. Well, they were short staffed as a lot of places were.
So now, even though people were clicking, we couldn’t get some of those books because they were short staffed or would be delayed. It was a harrowing time. Just navigating a lot of emotions at that time of people who were frustrated about, “I ordered my book and it should be airlifted and be on my porch tomorrow,” as we know some places can do that and have it there in 24 hours. And that was not our case.
And so mitigating hate email about, “where’s my book? I need it!” And we were emailing out, probably weekly, “this is the status, we’re trying to get your things out.” And like I said, I was working with the CEO of this big company, like, where are the books, you know, I’m the customer now, where are the books? We’re trying to get our customer the books. And he’s like, I’m not printing the books. It was just crazy.
So, it was a very tumultuous time for us emotionally. You know, we see all these people who are excited to buy books in the pandemic.
Then fast forward again to George Floyd, and there’s this sense of, oh my gosh, I’ve seen this murder occur on television. Ahmaud Arbery was in that space too.
What do I do? Some emails we also got were, “I’m seeing myself reflected through this. I have not done enough. I didn’t know that it was this problematic. I didn’t know racism and police brutality was this, right? I’ve heard about it. Yeah, I’ve seen it.” But to see it in, you know, in visual and color, I think it really impacted people in a very visceral way.
And so, the emails started to shift. Like, you know, I had an email. “I’m a little 70-year-old white woman. I don’t know what to process and how to do with this, what I’ve seen, but I want to do something. I see that racism is out here and I’ve heard about it. I’ve seen it. I have not experienced it for myself, but I want to know more. What should I read?” So, we were getting emails about that. And so, there was a deluge of those emails that were coming in.
And so for us, we were excited to have a resource, to have a mechanism in place, to be able to get those books out. But again, some of it was short-staffing. I mean, it was just crazy, Carolyn. I was stressing about how do we now get these books in people’s hands.
So, the time between when George Floyd was murdered to October, there was about five months. Mahogany Books moved 100,000 books in that five-month period. And here we are, the small team. I think it was about 10 of us on our team at that time. So, 100,000 books in five months.
People were like, oh my gosh, I want to learn more, I want to read.
And I want to purchase the books. They were very intentional. “I want to purchase from a Black bookstore.” Yes, I can go to the big store that’s online. I can go to all these places. But in seeing what’s happening and experiencing what George Floyd, that murder, how can I now turn around and support this? How do I make my dollars go here? How do I be intentional with every dollar that I spend? I’m seeing this happen. And I know there are Black businesses and Black organizations that can service almost anything that I can need. So, I’m going to be intentional with that dollar.
So that those 100,000 books, I mean, I would look at our sales and it was like a ticker tape. It was going so fast. I call it my unicorn year because I don’t know if we’ll ever see that year again, but it was just a lot of, it was very emotional trying to navigate. The post office was short staffed, so people were not getting their book orders, and it was missing or it was taking a long time. So, it was a lot of different things in that time period.
But here we are in 2024. Still residue of racism and things that are still here. We’re still trying to navigate that, not just as a Black owned business, but as a people, as a United States, as a world, how do we navigate some of that?
So that’s a little glimpse into the chaos that was happening.
Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, I think people were just looking for guidance. A lot of people, like you said, it was this moment that people wanted to know how to be supportive and how to learn what we didn’t know. So having that aspect, I think, also that sense of curation, that you are choosing these important titles and maybe titles that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise and helping us find them.
Ramunda Lark Young: And you’re right, a lot of people are ordering from home. So how do they get that impact or that feel from their computer? So, it is us thinking about how does it show up on our website, even our social media?
Are we talking about books? Are we showing examples of our events? They may get you excited about a title.
So, it is all those things kind of working in tandem too. I don’t think anything will ever replace walking into the bookstore, flipping the pages, reading the content. But we’re trying to and all online retailers that are in books are trying to find out, how do we continue that space?
But people still come in and read.
Our National Harbor Store alone has about 55,000 people that walk through the two doors every year for the past three years. So people are coming in, it’s just crazy to us, but they do come in and are still excited to have a physical book in their hands.
Carolyn Woodard: Yeah, you’re providing something that they need and want.
Ramunda Lark Young: Our phrase is Black Books Matter, you see on this side of me here, that we created. It really is this space that there is a necessity there for certain stories, certain histories, certain perspectives to be heard. If I had to grow up learning about Stonewall Jackson or Pocahontas, different things, different people’s perspective, then why not have the space, the bookstores, the mechanism to learn about from a Black person’s perspective?
They really, really do matter. We’re not saying other books don’t matter, but can we create some space on the shelf for this perspective? Because that shelf is not created in a Target or Walmart. Some of those books that I mentioned, they’re not there. So where do we find them?
I will say this, the other reason why my husband and I started this bookstore was we didn’t want to leave that in somebody else’s hands. Some people say, well, this is not important. Well, if they say it’s not important, then it doesn’t exist. And for me, my history at Black Wall Street, all those are important to me as a Black person, as a person who lives in this country.
To leave that in somebody else’s hands was something we didn’t want to do. So, we’re going to curate the titles. We’re going to put them on our shelves.
Banned Books Week happens once a year. We have banned books in our store year-round. This is something that’s important. About 80% of the books that are banned are from a Black person’s perspective or deals with history or slavery or things of that nature. It’s important. It may not feel good. It may not be shiny and cute, but it was part of history. People want to read that. For us as a bookstore, we want to make that accessible.
If they don’t want to read it, they don’t have to buy it. I don’t want to get too political, but tell people don’t buy it. Just say don’t buy it. It’s okay. But there are people who want to buy it.
Carolyn Woodard: I have just a couple more questions. What are you happy to work on? And how do you maintain your mental health and outlook?
Ramunda Lark Young: Great question. I definitely think, and all that I do is still making time for me. We’re juggling a lot of people. We have part of our team that lives in different parts of the country. So, it can be a little harrowing at times, but still making time for me.
I go get a massage every month. I just had one yesterday. So, you got Ramunda 2.0 today, probably.
But making that time for me, a sacred time for me.
And it may not be a massage. It may just be you going outside and just walking in your neighborhood. Or it may be you just, you know, sitting up and sitting down and crawling up with a book and having a great cup of tea.
So, making space for time, making space for me to have time, but making space also on my calendar to go have dinner with friends and to connect with people in real life has been something that rejuvenates me.
There’s a variety of things that allow me to still feel sane when so many crazy things are going on. But just centering myself spiritually is important to me.
Because the work that we do, when I hear a lot of people saying that our books and our history don’t matter, it can be, it can weigh on you. Because I know how important it was. If I had known that Black Wall Street was two miles from my house and all the great innovations and people, I, you know, I’m confident now. But how much taller and more confident I would have felt knowing that, wow, they look just like me and they created this or they did that. So, you know, it can, it can get tiresome, but I remember those moments in what we’re doing.
So that rejuvenates me. That makes me smile. That brings me joy because it’s not just work. It’s really, to me, it feels like we’re making a difference.
Historically Black people were hung for just the act of reading.
And here I am standing in a bookstore laced with books that I get to do at my leisure. So for me, it’s the most, you know, humbly, I don’t want to start tearing up every time I think about it.
I just want to add, because here I am, the luxury of making that space available to people who historically did not have that space. So, it means a lot to me.
The last thing I wanted to add, you know, a customer came into our store several years ago.
He’s about a 60-year-old man, a Black man, he walked in our store and he just kind of stood at the threshold. And he kind of stood and he looked from left to right, just kind of panned our whole bookstore. And he started tearing up and we walked over to him, and we said, sir, what’s going on? What’s, are you okay?
And he said, I’ve just never seen this many black books written from my perspective before and it means something to me.
So anyway, I’m tearing up, but I’m excited to talk about it every time.
It’s a real thing for me. And I think if you don’t hear or you don’t put a face or you put a voice or something like that, you’re just like, oh, it’s a little bookstore that’s here selling books. But the people behind it, it’s a real thing.
It’s a very deep thing and it’s a very personal thing. And it’s a very joyful thing for me to do it.
My dad only went to the third grade in reading. And he was so proud as he just passed, probably within the last 90 days or so he passed, but he was so proud. He only got to go to the third grade. So here I am with the bookstore and, you know, all this fun stuff and making them accessible.
So that brings me joy. That coupled with the time off to breathe, to go on vacation, to just sit and do nothing, which is something, right? Nothing, close my laptop, close my computer.
And just brings me joy too. So, it replenishes me.
Carolyn Woodard: All of those stories, all of that history, you know, the thought of letting that just fade away and not be told or that there’d be reasons to not tell those stories is really, it’s disturbing. I can see how important it would be to that gentleman to just see all of those books.
I did want to ask you, what are you working on next? It sounds like you have a lot of hope and a lot of joy. What are your next projects?
Ramunda Lark Young: Yeah. We’re looking at opening up a new store in 2025. That’s our goal. We’re doing the paperwork now. We’ll see. We’ll just, you know, we’re going to see.
But our pod, I know, right? I’m excited too. I’m still working on launching another podcast. So again, if you can’t come into our store, people can still hear a lot of those conversations via our website, our YouTube and our podcast. So, we’re launching another podcast series soon in 2025.
And looking at different ways, there’s a lot of products. When I go to bookstores now, I can see, you know, Harry Potter socks and all these other socks, but I don’t see socks that may have Malcolm X or things that really would tickle my fancy. And so, we’re looking at how do we launch a product line, not just in our stores, but to make them available to other bookstores and museums nationwide. So, we’re in full launch mode of that and creating those products.
That again, people want to see themselves and represent in a lot of different ways on bookmarks. That not just the basic Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, but there’s so many other amazing luminaries that have voices and have made a difference. So how do we make sure they’re represented?
We’re working on that too. So those are just a few of the initiatives that we’re working on.
Carolyn Woodard: Wow, that sounds so amazing. I don’t want to let you go as we’re kind of winding down. Can you talk a little bit about books?
I know you have lists on the website with recommendations for children, teens and adults, but do you have some books that you’re particularly recommending?
Ramunda Lark Young: I do have a few here, have a couple.
So, this one I’m excited about, Lovely One by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. She was our first Black woman who’s a Supreme Court Justice, and we hosted her for a DC appearance. It was her first appearance in DC, probably, I guess the book came out just a couple of months ago. We were excited to have her for a book signing here. It was crazy.
We’ve been doing this for 17 years now, but this book signing that we hosted sold out within, I think it was maybe two or three minutes. Like the site was going crazy. There was about 600 people here in DC that we hosted this book for.
So, this is one that I’m giving. We had her sign a lot of copies, so we’ve been selling those as well, first edition copies. Lovely One by Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Her name actually means Lovely One in African. I forgot, it’s Swahili maybe. Reading her and giving that book away.
Just a month or two ago, the 1619 Coffee Table Book came out. It’s called 1619 Project The Visual Experience. It’s a heavy two and a half, three pounds coffee table book that has just beautiful imagery in it. I’m not going to show it. But it’s the 1619 project. With different historical facts, of course, in it, it’s a huge book. We do have signed copies. She signed them. We’ve done a lot of her events here in DC.
But then also Nikki Giovanni, a faint poet, just passed. We just did a big event with her in February. So, she had a book that came out several years ago. It’s called Rosa. This is something fun. It’s about Rosa Parks, of course, but it’s written by Nikki Giovanni. So this is great for kids to have in their homes, in their collection, especially now to keep safe because, you know, she’s not here anymore. So, I would recommend this. It’s history, it’s beautiful imagery. It’s a great story, but also it just celebrates Nikki Giovanni. So, it’s a great gift to give to young people as well.
And my last one is, I love a good steamy romance. This is another way how I unwind. Just give me a good, I don’t know who’s on the call, but, you know, give me a down to earth romance book just to unwind, just to, I don’t know, anything historical. I just want to read something kind of salacious. So Kennedy Ryan, I thought I had her newest book here, Reel, R-E-E-L, just came out, reintroduced, but she has a lot of great kind of steamy romance books. So when I’m not reading business books, and I just want to read about something extra sexy, I will read some Kennedy Ryan.
So those are great books to have. If you just want to have some leisure reading, so curl up with a good book.
The last thing I want to show you is not a book. I think us and maybe one other retailer in the whole DMV area has this, but it’s called Ebony-opoly. So, it’s like Monopoly and we introduced it last year in our stores. And I posted on social media, we moved maybe 40 or 50 that day just from a social media post. We emailed it out. So now we have more Ebony-opoly and we’ve been selling these like crazy too.
It’s Ebony-opoly Reconstruction Edition. A lot of the properties are historical, historic black properties or historic monuments and landmarks that are throughout the United States. And on the back of the cards, you’ll have information, but there’s a QR code on the back that gives more information about that historic site that you may have landed on. So, Ebony-opoly has been doing really well. It’s not a book, but it’s from a bookstore. And Mahogany Books, and I think one other retailer here in the area has Ebony-opoly.
Carolyn Woodard: I love that idea. You know, in coming up through public school, your American history kind of went from Civil War to World War I. Maybe you got some inventions in there, the Age of Inventions and what have you. But really, Reconstruction is so fascinating. It’s such an interesting period in our history, just to think about what was going on, how many people whose stories were lost or are being lost and how we can bring those stories back, because they’re just so fascinating and interesting and admirable.
Ramunda Lark Young: Yeah, absolutely. There are studies that show, especially as little kids, as they see themselves, their ethnicity represented on the pages, the study says it increased their self-esteem and self-confidence.
When you see it, whether it’s on the pages, whether it’s on marketing campaigns, whether it’s on cartoons or statues, all of that impact, whether it’s Santa, we had photos with Black Santa for the second year.
All those things really impact your self-esteem and self-confidence by seeing you represented in different ways. And so, yeah, it does make a difference. Whether it’s a game or in statues, it impacts young people too. And those young people grow up to be full-fledged adults who may have different concerns, from not even being themselves, not even being recognized as a person in all those different ways. So yeah, books and games and all that. Statues all really do play a part in some of that.
Carolyn Woodard: I just wanted to thank you again, Ramunda, for coming. And sharing with us your story, that you’re clearly an entrepreneur. And I love to see it.
I felt like there was a lot that you talked about that really resonated with what our company does, especially that crazy year of trying to just juggle how people were going to work remotely, and how we were going to support them with IT, and how we were supporting our own families and our own work, and all of that was happening at that time.
So, it was really wonderful to hear your perspective on that year as well, and all the wonderful things that you’re doing. Thank you so much for coming and sharing your experiences with us.
Ramunda Lark Young: My pleasure. And I was going to say, of course, I’m going to shout out the bookstore, but also your local libraries. We understand some people may, there may be different things that impact people from not being able to buy.
I’m proud to be the new vice president of the DC Public Library Foundation. So, if you can’t buy the book, we want you to read the book regardless.
Support your libraries, support independent small businesses.
And I just thank you for the space. Thank you all for what you do, because if there’s no IT, there would be no Mahogany Books. Our first 10 years were online, so you would just, I don’t know who would be right now. But the work that you all do is important too. So thank you.
Carolyn Woodard: Thank you again, Ramunda.
Ramunda Lark Young: Thank you. Have a great weekend. Don’t eat too much and read a good book.