Is “radical” a bad word today? It certainly has been in the past.
After World War I, in the era of the Palmer raids, being branded a radical could get you hunted, deported, or even killed. After World War II, in the era of McCarthyism and COINTELPRO, America went through a fresh round of anti-radical hysteria. During the Civil Rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was denounced as a radical by some of his fellow civil rights leaders and even jailed. During the Vietnam War, when student demonstrators were shot and killed at Kent State, many Americans cheered and said they got what they deserved.
With the dawn of the reactionary Reagan/Bush era, anyone involved in any form of activism or organizing (on the left) was suspect. It became a slur to call someone a “card-carrying member of the ACLU”—hardly a radical credential. And when Barack Obama ran for president, he was denounced for his history of community organizing, with reactionaries raising the spectres of Saul Alinski and Bill Ayers (who, as it happens, is coming to Buffalo this weekend—details below).
How did I learn about such things? Certainly not in grade school, and not even in college, but from being a student of history. Also, in no small part, because a decade and a half ago Burning Books opened in Buffalo. They don’t just have books, but also offer events, talks, film screenings, and discussion groups where people can learn what grade schools—and even many colleges—are afraid to teach.
Today, “radical” hardly seems radical, after a deep recession where everyone suffered except for the reckless financiers who triggered it, after the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and Me Too movements, after the rise of Trumpism, after a pandemic where many of the most vulnerable were left to fend for themselves, and now with signs of catastrophic climate-change everywhere.
Now, if you’re not radical, you’re just not paying attention.
Against this backdrop, it’s no surprise that a radical bookstore has grown and thrived here in Buffalo, which has suffered more than almost any other large city in the country from the calamities of unchecked capitalism and conservatism. But even more, Burning Books has built an international reputation.
In retrospect, it seems almost natural that Burning Books would have made such a good home on Connecticut Street, which has a long history in Buffalo radicalism.
Just down the street, at 454 Connecticut, was a storefront building that hosted a series of radical organizations prior to its sad demolition a decade ago. Among those organizations were the Center for United Labor Action and Women United for Action. Below is a sampling of newspaper articles about their actions.
A radical expansion
This summer and fall I’ve been following the steady progress of the Burning Books expansion project that you’re read about here and here and here. While out and about in August I was not surprised to see Michael Gainer and ReUse Action, who have been doing a radical kind of social entrepreneurship for a couple of decades now, at work on the project.
They were constructing a design that is more, well, radical than the original, much more traditional storefront design first proposed. The project architect is none other than Brad Wales who, while he might not call himself a radical, has certainly gotten involved in a number of activist causes, including the fight against fracking in NY and the battle over the Kensington Expressway.
After talking with them, I reached out to Burning Books co-owner Leslie Pickering for an update. Here’s what he told me [lightly edited for clarity]:
Our expansion project is moving along, but like everything we do it is very grassroots. The expansion triples the size of our sales floor, plus adds a 99-person event space, so it is quite a costly endeavor for a little independent bookstore to take on. We’re addressing this by breaking it into phases and completing these one at a time. Phase I was purchasing the building, doing demo and stabilization, and getting all the architectural plans and permits taken care of. The end of this construction season will see the end of Phase II, where basically everything you see from the street will be built, plus a bunch of smaller items (like wheelchair accessibility into our front door). From there, we will need to continue fundraising and moving towards opening up the inside and joining the two spaces together.
We just had another event that was packed beyond capacity, and which could have been a lot bigger, had we the room to host it. Bill Ayers is going be speaking here, which is a ridiculous event to have in a space that only holds three dozen people. We are doing this fundraiser dinner with Bill Ayers, which will be really cool.
Besides our revamped GoFundMe, we’ve really been growing our Friends of Burning Books Patreon lately. The other thing worth mentioning is that we’ve formed a non-profit that we now run out event organizing through, called the Social Justice Community Education Project. The community won’t notice much of a difference besides that our events have been really ramped up, even beyond pre-COVID rates. We’ve been hosting a lot of events lately and are really booked up through November at this point. This non-profit helps us to maintain such a rigorous schedule, and gear up for our much larger event space that our expansion will bring.
The more support we have and the more funds we raise, the sooner our expanded space will arrive. It’s been really exciting to see it coming together like it has been throughout this summer. And as usual, we’ve also been doing a lot behind the Justice for Geraldine & Martin campaign, have been amplifying the Save Zoar Valley campaign, etc. Having this kind of community infrastructure has significantly enabled and boosted all kinds of local social justice efforts over the years.
So there you have it. As for a ribbon cutting, according to Leslie that will depend in the pace of fundraising as the project moves toward completion. It will likely be next year, but if you want to help hurry that along you know what to do.
And stay tuned.
Get connected:
Original Burning Books expansion fundraiser video