Meet Our Winter 2025–26 Partner Bookstore! Baldwin & Co
“Read read read. Never stop reading” —James Baldwin
Baldwin & Co bookstore is housed in a restored art deco building on the corner of Elysian Fields and St. Claude Avenues in the Marigny District of New Orleans. New Orleans, a city known for big groups of people going out and having fun together, was suffering especially during the covid lockdown—an economic report showed their small businesses closing at nearly double the national median rate—when returned native son DJ Johnson opened the bookstore and cafe in 2021, presciently saying he was anxious to return people to gathering face to face. He had already opened an art bar on the same block, property he had bought recently near where he grew up, with the goal of providing a gathering place that “could be an artistic home for creatives and intellectuals” in New Orleans, a place “where you can come and engage in stimulating conversations over cocktails and discuss some pending political, social, and economic issues with a nice atmosphere.” He has spoken of fostering places where “the chairs fill with some of the brightest minds in the city: politicians, professors, entrepreneurs, students, and engaged residents.” “It’s hard to find those spaces in New Orleans,” he has said, “particularly being Black-owned.”
This vision of creating a point of connection that would be fun, enriching, and empowering was coalescing in his vision for the bookstore. “I wanted to provide nourishment for the soul of New Orleans,” he said. And
I wanted to create an intellectual hub for Blacks in the city. It was important for us to have a space where we felt like we could go and create. Go where we can feel like the best version of ourselves. Somewhere we have access to information and access to our greatest thinkers within our history and legacy. A lot of times, you know, we don’t know how powerful we can be until we read our history. I wanted to create a space where that history lived on the shelves and was a testament to our greatness.
He saw the company of books as “a school of enlightenment.” He has invoked the old cultures of the coffee house “penny university,” a bookstore as a gathering of minds.
He associated this vision with the work of James Baldwin, which he had discovered as a readerly child in a family in which a single mother of seven encouraged reading among her children and a father insisted, “You’re going to read about white folks all day in school. In this house, you’re going to read about Black people. You’re going to read about your people.” This quote is painted on the wall of the shop: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” For James Baldwin, literary exploration led inevitably to advocacy and social change (“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see”). The Baldwin & Co web site says that, inspired by James Baldwin, “we leverage the power of books to ignite social justice and inspire change. Books have the incredible ability to challenge perceptions, broaden horizons, and empower individuals to advocate for a fair and equitable society,” and “we believe that reading is a powerful tool that can fuel personal and collective progress.” Two murals of James Baldwin by New Orleans street artist Jay McKay dominate the space, one painted on spines of books and one bearing the quotation, “Read read read. Never stop reading. And when you can’t read anymore … write” (there is a third of Langston Hughes). With a hat tip to the legendary Shakespeare and Co English-language bookstore in Paris, DJ Johnson imagined a place full of books that would beget influential circles of readers.
Like several of Book Post’s partner bookstores, including our most recent partner the Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, and Dragonfly in Decorah, Iowa, Baldwin & Co operates with a conjoined nonprofit (the Baldwin & Co Foundation) which enables it to raise funds to serve its social mission, for example by giving away books to underserved readers. Each child who attends a Baldwin & Co story hour comes away with a book: the store’s commitment to building home libraries responds to studies showing the far reaching benefits for literacy and educational advancement of book ownership. (I have been an advisor a group that is working with these and other booksellers to develop nonprofit models.)
As the elevating quotations from Baldwin show, the store’s commitment to building community literacy goes beyond the pragmatic, but it is also that. “Literacy and effective communication are fundamental tools for personal and professional growth,” the foundation’s web site says. “Our mission is rooted in inspiring growth, both in individuals and their communities,” calling literacy “an efficient and highly effective means to end extreme poverty.” The web site notes that 85 percent of those involved in the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate and 70 percent of all incarcerated adults cannot read at fourth-grade level. When people asked DJ Johnson “why are you opening up a Black-owned bookstore that’s going to focus on Black books, in a Black community, in a city that has one of the lowest literacy rates in the entire country?” He said, “Well, that is why.” Baldwin & Co seeks to inspire even as it removes barriers to opportunity, addresses education, income, and employment disparities, and combats poverty and fosters economic empowerment. Of his own story DJ Johnson says,
being an avid reader saved my life and gave me the opportunity to purchase these properties. I’m not naturally an intelligent person [! —ed.], but I’m obsessed with learning … an obsession that comes from reading. Reading is the gateway to success. It’s something about the written word that tattoos information in our brains. That’s invaluable because it’s that information that goes out and transforms the world. If we want to see a better world, we all have to become readers.
Last year DJ Johnson took this vision a step further when he created a partnership with a San Antonio-based credit union, “Credit Human,” to open a “Financial Health Center” in adjoining space. Credit Human co-sponsors financial literacy classes in the store and college-savings accounts alongside those books given away at the children’s story hours, providing an initial deposit and future matching funds and opportunities for kids to earn more contributions. By interweaving book-learning and financial capacity-building, Baldwin & Co’s young visitors are at once educated, given life skills, and potentially equipped to go to college without debt, a circumstance, DJ Johnson notes, that can change the financial trajectory of a whole family and help to lift a community’s generational curse of impoverishment.
Credit Human was founded in the thirties as a credit union by twelve government workers committed to “a belief in others, giving credit to the dreams of our members and being more human by treating each other with the respect that all of us deserve.” Their Financial Health Centers are “spaces designed for real, judgment-free conversations about money,” prioritizing “listening over selling, helping members build financial slack and navigate financial stress with personalized support.” In opening a branch in New Orleans, home of its chief executive, they saw “a city that has been increasingly neglected by financial institutions,” an underserved market that “did not have the financial services necessary to support many of its citizens, particularly those experiencing financial stress.” Baldwin and Co saw in the partnership an opportunity to “facilitate financial education, access to capital, entrepreneurial and investment opportunities for the community” and “address the economic disparities” in New Orleans. “We’re not taught how to invest. We’re not taught how to make our money work for us,” DJ Johnson told the local news site nola.com when announcing the partnership. The opportunity to access these services is bringing people into the bookstore as well.
When the lot that now houses Credit Human, formerly Gene’s Po-Boy, founded by Eugene “Gene” Raymond Theriot in 1968, went up for sale, many locals feared that it would be converted to luxury housing and exacerbate the growing unaffordability of the city. An Essence story on Baldwin & Co observed that a report from The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) had recently found New Orleans to be “gentrifying at an abnormally rapid rate” compared to other cities in its Gentrification and Disinvestment 2020 report. Baldwin & Co’s Marigny neighborhood was originally sold by Count de Marigny to a free woman of color, Essence learned from a local historian. Desiree Sennett wrote in the New Orleans Advocate that in buying the property DJ Johnson joined “a growing contingent of Black residents, in New Orleans and across the nation, who are ‘buying back the block,’ or becoming property owners and revitalizing communities where they live and work.” She continued, “city policy experts tout such investing as key in the revival of predominately Black neighborhoods, which often struggle with devaluation, speculative investing and other barriers to economic growth.” She quoted a Brookings report finding that in other gentrifying areas “buy the block” efforts had given long-time residents a say in neighborhood development. “We have to reclaim ownership in communities that have long been ours,” she quotes DJ Johnson. “It’s a stand against the erasure of our culture and history. For me, I’m not just buying real estate ... I’m investing in a legacy and the idea that this block can be a beacon of Black excellence and resilience.”
Credit Human contributes to this effort by helping families to stabilize their living situations, achieve homeownership, and contribute to the long-term sustainability of the city. As Baldwin & Co’s announcement of their partnership said, “access to affordable mortgages is not just about housing; it’s about preserving the essence of New Orleans and ensuring that all its residents can continue to call it home.” DJ Johnson continues, “When individuals and families have greater financial security, they are better equipped to meet their basic needs, invest in education and healthcare, and save for the future. This, in turn, leads to increased consumer spending, job creation, and a more robust local economy. Moreover, financially stable communities often experience lower crime rates, improved infrastructure, and increased access to essential services, creating a virtuous cycle of prosperity that benefits everyone within the community. Ultimately, this is not just about individual success but also about building resilient and thriving communities in New Orleans.” DJ Johnson also envisioned access to capital and assistance in developing business plans for “young entrepreneurs who have minimal options to access capital to finance their dreams … opportunities that are scarce in New Orleans as the gaps left by larger banks are expanding, especially in communities with limited access to financial services.”
In another example of identifying a community need and responding where it meets with literacy, DJ Johnson noticed that there were not podcast studios in the city and reflected that “some people are auditory learners. And the exchange of information is more important than how you receive the information.” He wanted them to have a space where they can “verbalize their words and use the power of the tongue to speak profound thoughts.” He built a podcast studio for community members, which also converts the bookstore’s author events and literary gatherings into YouTube and social media clips that can spread the bookstore’s message beyond its immediate audience. Circulating bookstore events in this way helps digitally attuned audiences to realize that a bookstore can be a place they want to be. The store also partners with the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival to bring free writers’ workshops with Louisiana writers, unlocking another source of community connection. Other ways to get involved include low-cost memberships, a discord discussion group, an in-person book club, a newsletter, and you can even reserve seats to hang out.
Last Saturday, Baldwin & Co hosted a Friendsgiving Brunch, with live music, dancing, food, and a giveaway of donated shoes, clothes, toys, and books for kids (“hard times shouldn’t mean hopeless holidays,” their announcement said). Its financial advice events also come in the form of a party, like July’s Financial Health and Wellness Fair and their opening Money Smart Block Party. The way all this began with the purchase of a lot near DJ Johnson’s childhood home reminded me of the lost promise of forty acres and a mule; of a quote from our most recent bookselling partner, the Berry Center’s John Berry: “If you want a man or woman to love their country, let them own a little piece of it”; and of the relationship between groundedness and community that can be expressed, spiritually and intellectually, in bookselling. A key factor in a bookseller’s longevity is ownership of its space. For a farm, like a bookstore, a fruitful relationship between having and growing and giving is an indicator of healthy stewardship. Another bookseller that works with a nonprofit, The Kings English in Salt Lake City, which donates many books for children in native communities, calls its charitable arm “Brain Food.” When he put tables and chairs and sofas and coffee and microphones together with novels and histories and poems and memoirs and children’s stories, DJ Johnson understood his investment in a piece of a city as more than financial: it was an act of emplacedness that he chose to refract outward, a renewable gift based in the plenitude of reading.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. Read her Notebooks on books and the reading life here (Reader’s Guide here).
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Baldwin & Co, in New Orleans, is Book Post’s Winter 2025–26 bookselling partner! We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com. And support the Baldwin & Co nonprofit’s mission of leveraging the power of books to ignite social justice and inspire change with your donation or membership—or see if there are ways to support your local bookseller financially.
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