Black Garnet Books Black Business SPOTLIGHT

By Chris Juhn Staff Contributor

When Dionne Sims (DS) decided to launch Black Garnet Books in the summer of 2020, her life was headed in a totally different direction. “I was working in the tech industry in 2020,” said the 30-year-old Sims of her journey to becoming a Black bookstore owner.

“After the murder of George Floyd, I took a break to focus on community work. I was getting involved in protests, rallies and cleanups—things like that. During that break from work, I realized that’s what I really want to be doing. I wanted to be in community with people and connecting with them face-to-face, versus just sitting in an office in the suburbs working all day.”

Before moving into Black Garnet’s current brick-andmortar space on University Ave. West in St. Paul this past October—where she has four employees—she operated as an online bookstore, occasionally opening at pop-up sites or other locations around the Twin Cities, including sharing space with a local tattoo parlor.

MSR: What inspired you to start your business?

DS: I was looking for a Blackowned bookstore to support, and I realized that there weren’t any in Minnesota. I tweeted that [a Black book- store] didn’t exist here. That became my dream, to start a Black-owned bookstore here. Everyone was like, ‘Yeah, you should do that.’ And so, it all just kind of snowballed from there. ing on loans. And it’s really kind of week-to-week. But it’s definitely worth it, to not have that stress of debt hanging over us.

MSR: What were you doing before the bookstore?

DS: I was a user experience designer. I was working at different tech companies around the Twin Cities.

I didn’t really know how to get into that kind of work I wanted to do. I didn’t know if I wanted to be a professional organizer. I just knew that I wanted to work in the community. At the same time, I was also looking for a way to decompress from how stressful that time was. And for me reading is a big way for me to decompress.

DS: Bookstores are communal hubs. It’s a place where people know that they can come in, where events are being held that are going to be of interest to them, especially with independent bookstores. Since they’re so hyper-local, they can be really specific in catering to the needs of the neighborhood, as well as the needs and desires of [other] people in the city.

For us, we’re a queer space. The majority of our employees are queer. I’m queer. Especially during pride month, but also all months, we like to be able to let people know that this is a safe place to come and get those books that are being banned across the country. It’s just a welcoming space.

MSR: Do you sell anything besides books?

DS: Besides books, we also have stationery, puzzles, home goods like mugs, candles, socks, t-shirts, tote bags—all that kind of stuff. But then we also do events every month. We give people the opportunity to meet authors, both local authors and national authors.

We also do events that are not book-focused. We did speed-dating last month, and we’re going to do that again. We have an art fair that we regularly host and have events that are designed just to bring people into the space so they can be together, and not necessarily focused on selling books.

MSR: What has been the most rewarding part of owning your business?

DS: I love being able to see people’s joy in finding a book that they actually feel that they relate to. That’s probably my favorite part.

Our bookstore is different because we only carry books by Black, Indigenous, or other people of color—every single book. If you buy a book here, you’re supporting a person of color no matter what book you buy, which I think is really cool.

We have the freedom to do quirky little art fairs, or partner up with breweries and have adult book fairs, which we’re going to host in August.

We do more than just sell books. We help create spaces where people can come together. So, I want to do a lot more of those kinds of events.

MSR: What advice would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur?

MSR: How does your business impact the community?

MSR: What’s your bestselling book right now?

DS: “All About Love,” by bell hooks.

MSR: What has been your biggest challenge in owning a business?

DS: I think the biggest challenge is money. I think that there are a lot of people who start businesses either with income that they already have, or because they have networks that are highly funded. I think for Black people—in a state where there is such a large financial gap between White people and Black people—it can be really difficult for us to get the funding that we need. And the kind of funding that’s sustainable.

I think after the initial excitement of the bookstore died down, there’s always that period where you’re like, ‘Okay, I have to figure a way to keep the doors open.’ Luckily, I have connections to the City where I was able to get support and receive a working grant from the City.

But even that wasn’t extremely accessible. And it’s not something that I would consider accessible to most people, because they either don’t know that it exists, or because it’s just so much work to get a grant. You kind of need someone who’s focused on that full time. I think that was probably the hardest part.

MSR: Did you apply for any business loans?

DS: I applied for one bank loan, just a small one. It’s been paid off already. I know that one of the biggest things that causes small businesses to close is debt and not being able to claw your way out once you’re in it.

Those loans seem great upfront, but then a year later you’re like, ‘Oh my God. A big chunk of my income is just going into paying back this initial loan.’ It really sinks a lot of people.

I’ve been really deliberate about trying not to take out any loans. I mean, it’s hard. It’s stressful since you aren’t rely-

Other bookstores, they mostly try and carry books that are on the bestseller lists. We have those big bestsellers too. But here, it’s also a bunch of

DS: Really talk to people. When you’re starting something new and you’re not sure if it’s going to work, there’s a lot of fear involved. That can make you feel like, ‘I’m going to keep this dream or this goal to myself and try to do all the planning and everything behind the scenes, just in case I fail, and it doesn’t work out.’ I was scared the entire time. But it’s easier to be scared out loud and openly than it is to do it internally. Plus, it gives people opportunities to help and support you in ways that you probably weren’t even thinking of. There were a lot of things that I didn’t know I needed help with until someone was like, “I can help you out with this.” Or they offered their services. That kind of stuff won’t happen if you aren’t talking to people and being honest and open. You have to be vulnerable to be open about something. But it’s really the only way to get things done in a good amount of time, and to local authors of color that you may not have heard of. Here, we have authors that definitely aren’t getting the kind of a big marketing push that maybe White authors are getting. I think that that’s something that’s really special about us. And we can still fill all of our bookshelves, which I think is something that 20 years ago wouldn’t have been possible. also get it done in a way that doesn’t like kill you with the stress of it.

MSR: What’s your vision for your business? What does success look like for you?

DS: I definitely want to do more community-focused events that aren’t just specifically about book selling. People can still buy books at them, which I think is really cool, but it’s also just fun. I want to bring the fun back into bookstores that you don’t really get with places like Barnes and Noble, and that you definitely don’t get with Amazon, since it’s just online.

The joy in having an indie bookstore is that you can do whatever you want with it. It exists to meet the desires and wants of the people who come to it. So, we have that freedom to do things like speed dating.

MSR: How can people find out about your events?

DS: We have put all of our events on our website. We also put them on social media, on Instagram (@blackgarnetbooks). People can also sign up for our newsletter, either online or through social media.

MSR: What would you like to add that has not been covered?

DS: We are excited to just sell books to folks, and we’re excited to get to know and meet community members here and through our events that we do across the Twin Cities. I hope people come visit or they stop by one of our events.

Black Garnet Bookstore is located at 1319 University Avenue West in Saint Paul. For more information, call (651) 641-7515, or go to www.blackgarnetbooks.com.

Doj

Continued from page 1 practices against Blacks and Native Americans and those suffering a mental health crisis.

At the meeting between the Unity Community Mediation Team and the DOJ, members asked that the MPD recruit more officers from the community—officers who they believe will see them with dignity.

“Every day [Lake Street Somali Mall goers] feel discriminated against by the Minneapolis Police Department, especially when it comes to Friday prayers,” says Farhil Khalif, executive director of Voice of East African Women. “They feel like they’ve been harassed or given a ticket on the spot. A lot of people believe they’re being targeted because they’re Black.”

Mary LaGarde, executive director of the Minneapolis American Indian Center, echoed this sentiment. “We want our law enforcement to reflect the community that they’re serving. We want our Native people to be police

Blue Line

Continued from page 1 line between Theodore Wirth Park in North Minneapolis and 71st Avenue in Brooklyn Park.

Planners had also tried to route the extension through North Minneapolis once before, by way of Penn Avenue and West Broadway, but abandoned the idea because it would have involved demolishing homes. At the same time, residents began getting priced out of housing as rents increased because landlords were excited about the prospect of such a line going through the community.

Worries about displacement intensified when planners decided to give the heart of North Minneapolis another shot at the Blue Line extension alignment. This time, after hearing from local activists who have been working with communities along the line to address their concerns, planners decided to work with CURA to develop guidelines to mitigate the impacts from building the light-rail extension.

“We heard very clearly from our community residents and businesses their concerns about displacement,” said Hennepin County project manager Cathy Gold at the May meeting of the Blue Line Extension Corridor Management Committee, the committee that is overseeing the project’s construction. “We want to make sure that we are

Festival

Continued from page 1 the many Somali state and local employees as an example of how far the community had come since arriving to Minnesota in the early 1990s. Many of these organizations, including Ahmed’s, attended the festival in hopes of recruiting more people to the workforce.

“This is integration,” he said.

“Even though this is Somali Independence Day, the people here are Somali American. Every officers, people that can relate to our community members.”

Even though some may want to abolish the police, and have the money spent investing in resources to build strong communities, Rachel Dionne

Thunder said we still need the police in some cases.

“I believe that we do need law preparing our community, and we’re going to have things in place for them to survive the construction elements and then thrive into the future.”

The recommendations include:

• Provide basic income for all residents living in neighborhoods affected by the Blue Line extension.

• Landlords who own buildings in neighborhoods affected by the Blue Line extension must provide relocation assistance if they choose to terminate a lease with a tenant.

• Tenants who are displaced from the neighborhood because of the Blue Line extension project should be given priority to return to similar units at the same rent they paid before they were displaced.

• Tenants facing eviction receive the services of a government-funded attorney.

• Tenants who live in neighborhoods affected by the Blue Line extension get first right-ofrefusal for buildings put up for sale by landlords.

• Limit the use of background and credit checks on prospective tenants.

• Empower tenants to organize for better living conditions.

• Implement rent stabilization, which could include rent control.

• Preserve naturally occurring affordable housing, which often consists of older housing stock.

• Require that new multifam- enforcement, because there are situations that I don’t want to see our community members put in without the proper training and resources and tools that police departments have access to,” says Dionne Thunder. “We need law enforcement to investigate our missing and murdered Indigenous women and rela- ily housing projects include a percentage of affordable units for low-income renters.

• Zero- to low-interest loans for longtime resident homebuyers who have lived in Blue Line extension neighborhoods, with disincentives for those intend- tives. We need those resources to come into our community, but we need them to come in a way that’s healthy and helpful, not overbearing and restrictive and abusive.”

Pastor Ian D. Bethel agrees, but also admits it will be difficult for MPD to focus on hiring more officers, which he believes will make Minneapolis safe.

“Remember that movie ‘Ghostbusters’? Who you gonna call? If someone breaks into your home, who you gonna call? You’re gonna immediately dial 911.

“We need the police,” said Bethel. “The numbers in the police department are not there [to keep us safe]. You tell a 10-year-old, ‘Go into policing as a career.’ It’s [a] hard sell. We cannot give up on that.”

The meeting was reportedly among more than a dozen that the DOJ held in Minneapolis last week. The DOJ was reportedly present at the Sabathani Community Center on June 26 and the North Regional Library on June 27, as well as meeting with organizations working with the Native American and needed to invest in their implementation and suggest it can be funded by a combination of public and private sources, as was done when the Green Line was being built through St. Paul. The recommendations also include developing groups to implement

East African communities.

However, many in the community did not know about ditional opportunities for input in the coming weeks in this ongoing process.” They invite community members who are interested in attending future sessions or providing their feedback on the consent decree to email community. minneapolis[at]usdoj.gov or call 866-432-0268. agency in the state is here so if you want to be part of it if you want to get to know them and get information, everything you ing to flip homes.

• Collective land ownership, similar to the Rondo Community Land Trust.

• Implement regulations limiting corporate-landlord ownership in impacted cities.

• Develop city and county policies to manage disposal of surplus land that does not prioritize profitgenerating sales of properties.

• Provide support for small businesses such as marketing support, grants for lost revenue because of light rail construction, and technical assistance.

• Prioritize BIPOC vendors in building out the Blue Line extension.

• Preserve cultural and physical features that reflect the character of the communities that live along the Blue Line extension.

The recommendations do not address how much money is them, as well as an agenda to lobby for state funding in the next legislative session. Implementing the recommendations, in addition to realigning the Blue Line through North Minneapolis, could very well increase the $1.536 billion budgeted for the original alignment.

KB Brown, who owns Wolfpack Promotionals on West Broadway, sees the anti-displacement recommendations as a bargaining chip to save the North Side from gentrification. He neither supports nor opposes the project. “By having the Blue Line coming now, you have the anti-displacement measures in place to actually dictate the resources that will come to the community,” said Brown.

“The city and county own more property on Broadway the meetings, which were organized on short notice. “One thing we mentioned is the need to give the community better notice of outreach meetings. We’ll be working with them on this issue,” said Communities United Against Police Brutality Director Michelle Gross.

A DOJ spokesperson stresses that they plan to have “ad- than most private business owners. If the light rail doesn’t come through, [Minneapolis and Hennepin County] will just turn around and sell those properties to the large developers that we’re trying to keep out [by selling surplus land to the highest bidder]. Then gentrification will take its toll, and [the Met Council] will come right back and put the Blue Line here, eight years from now.”

Met Council member Reva Chamblis, who represents Brooklyn Park, believes such an investment needs to be substantial. “I know I’ve personally been waiting for over four years for this presentation. It’s much bigger than anti-displacement. It’s making sure that, as has been said, our community benefits. Those investments need to be substantial in order to have a substantial impact,” said Chamblis.

The Blue Line Coalition, the organization that has been organizing local communities around the Blue Line extension project for close to a decade, supports the recommendations.

“We’re advocating for the people-centered development strategy, one that is going to uplift the lives of our community members and prevent them from being displaced. We don’t want to see mistakes from the past repeated,” said Nelima Sitati Munene, executive director of the Brooklyn Park nonprofit African Career Education and Research Inc. Munene added formation,” said Misky Abshir, a technologist and founder of Noma Capital who sat at the EABA booth. “There is a force when it comes to Somali community with sharing resources, sharing information. When they say representation matters, it really matters here. Because we see other Somalians taking risks—it’s like, if that brother or that sister could do it, so can I.”

Nonetheless, Dionne believes police officers will not fix all of our problems. “There need to be resources that are invested in behavioral health. There need to be task forces for trafficking, for missing and murdered Indigenous women. There need to be resources for addiction and homelessness. There needs to be protection for our children, investment in our future generations,” says Dionne Thunder.

“We can’t expect [police to be] a fix-all. But we can expect them to have integrity, to have trust, to be healthy, and to be accountable for their actions.” that Brooklyn Park has the biggest share of proposed Blue Line extension stations, and with that comes pressure from developers who want to build housing that community members might not be able to afford.

H. Jiahong Pan welcomes reader comments at hpan@spokesman-recorder.com.

Some of the recommendations may face an uphill battle. Although Mayor Jacob Frey, who serves on the committee, voted to adopt the recommendations, he has gone on record as opposing rent stabilization, which is one of the key recommendations. During his campaign for mayor he said that he supports fostering dialogue on controversial issues such as rent stabilization.

The recommendations don’t necessarily help Northside residents who want to develop the corridor near-term. Some, like Makram El-Amin, are wondering how the light rail would affect the properties that they want to develop. El-Amin’s family owns a building near Penn and West Broadway that they want to redevelop into a commercial kitchen for caterers and small entrepreneurs, with professional offices and small business incubator spaces upstairs.

“If something did get put on that site,” said El-Amin, “if it’s determined that’s where [the light rail is] going to go, then whatever we did would have to come down.” need is right here.”

H. Jiahong Pan welcomes reader comments at hpan@spokesman-recorder.com.

Amani Radman, CEO and founder of the East African Business Association (EABA), attended the festival to connect with entrepreneurs and invite them to become a part of her association. Radman said that Minnesota has been a great state that has fostered the right environment for entrepreneurship to thrive within the community.

“I think Minnesota is open and is very open to giving other cultures the opportunity and recognize that where I think other states are still not ready to embrace other cultures,” she said.

“Looking within the community, there is a collective effort when it comes to sharing in-

Abdi Mohamed welcomes reader comments at amohamed@spokesman-recorder.com.

“When they say representation matters, it really matters here. Because we see other Somalians taking risks— it’s like, if that brother or that sister could do it, so can I.”