Content area
Full Text
Una G. Mulzac came to mind last week when it was announced that Revolution Books was opening a store in Harlem. The location of the bookstore, which will continue to shelve an array of militant and radical books, is near the corner of 132nd Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, only a few steps from where Mulzac's Liberation Bookstore stood for years.
Her bookstore, which closed in 2005, was established in 1967 and welcomed by the activist community in particular after the demolishing of Lewis Michaux's bookstore, the House of Common Sense and the Home of Proper Propaganda, as he called it.
In the same way Mulzac carried on the service provided by Michaux, Revolution Books has the unenviable duty to carry on the tradition Mulzac was famous for and that she delivered with passion for more than a generation. No matter the success of the new venture, it will fall short of matching Mulzac's impressive resume as an activist, book lover and defiant opposition to injustice, be it socio-political repression or the encroachment of the city on her property rights.
Mulzac came about her militancy and resistance from her family, mainly her father, Hugh Mulzac, who worked with Marcus Garvey as a ship captain and his advisor on a seafaring business in the 1920s. He was also the first African-American to command a ship in the U.S. Merchant Marine.
Mulzac was probably at sea when his daughter was born April 19, 1923, in Baltimore, though she grew up in Brooklyn. Her inexhaustible spirit and physical stamina were apparent at a very early age. She was 14 in 1937 when she won the 50-yard dash championship...