About
Some stores sell books. We sell liberation.
Reparations Books & Café is the vision of Hilerie D. Lind, PhD candidate in Africana Women's Studies at Clark Atlanta University, author, podcast host, political organizer, and founder of The Griot Collective Group.
Hilerie has been a reader, a writer, and a truth-teller since childhood. She wrote her first story in the 3rd grade. She wrote her first sermon in the 9th grade. She has spent her entire life in the space where words meet power, and Reparations Books & Café is the physical manifestation of everything she has learned in that space.
The inspiration for this store came from two places that could not be more different, and could not be more connected.
The first was the quiet joy of mother-daughter tea days, afternoons spent in cozy spaces with warm cups and good conversation, where Hilerie's love of books and community first took root.
The second was the urgent intellectual work of her doctoral dissertation, "The Price of the Ticket", which examines the gendered bargains Black people make for success, survival, and belonging in American culture. The Faustian Bargain. The Sacrificial Bargain. The price Black women pay when they absorb harm, stay silent, and support the collective even when it destroys them.
Reparations Books & Café sits at the intersection of those two places. It is warm and welcoming AND it is politically sharp. It is a place for tea AND a place for theory. It is a gathering space AND a site of resistance.
This store is the answer to a question Hilerie has been asking her whole life: What would it look like if Black women had a space that was built entirely for them, and refused to apologize for it?
Mission
Reparations Books & Café serves as a vital cultural institution for the Atlanta community, offering a safe, welcoming, and intellectually rigorous space where Black people can gather, learn, organize, and be affirmed.
We uplift Black authors. We center Black feminist thought. We connect the academy to the community and the community to the academy. We believe that every book is a tool of liberation, and that access to that tool should never be gatekept.
Vision
To be Atlanta's premier Black feminist cultural institution, a place where the scholarship lives on the shelves, the theory lives in the programming, and the community lives in the room.
We envision a space where a grandmother and her granddaughter can both find themselves in the books on the shelf. Where a PhD student and a first-generation college student can sit at the same table and learn from each other. Where the next generation of Black feminist scholars, organizers, and storytellers finds their first home.
