Bound and Determined
By Lena McGee
From: UCLA Magazine
A Bruin family has kept Caravan Book Store successful for more than 60 years.
When Morris Bernstein ’47 and his wife, Lillian, opened Caravan Book Store on downtown Los Angeles’ Grand Avenue in 1954, he had no idea how much impact he’d have on the local community. At a time when the streetcar was the main source of transportation and people dressed up to go downtown, Caravan — once adjacent to the former “Bookseller’s Row” — was the place to go. To book lovers, it was Disneyland, a place where you could find old, rare and curious manuscripts you couldn’t get anywhere else.
Between 2004 and 2015, I was the curator and host of the Rhapsodomancy Reading Series in Los Angeles. For the first two years I shared this role with Andrea Quaid, until she moved away; after that, I counted on my romantic partner-turned-roadie and the loyal audience members I had to keep the series afloat.
Ocean Vuong at ALOUD Reading Series, Central Library 
In honor of Black History month (a few days late, I know), I am highlighting many of the powerful African American authors of Los Angeles literature. Their voices tap into a Los Angeles rarely portrayed, much less portrayed honestly. Nonetheless they tape in to an essential Los Angeles of a good, strong community struggling to survive among the racist realities of the LAPD and redlining that relegated most of them to the South Central/Watts neighborhoods of Los Angeles. In their writing you can hear the ancestral griot, telling their collective stories, as Kamau Kaaood has done for decades with his spoken word poetry. You can experience their witnessing that such writers as Michael Datcher in his Memoir Raising Fences does, when he first moves with his family from Indiana to South Central Los Angeles in 1977 at 10. Here he witnesses and experiences police brutality against Blacks. He was “returning from Gaffey Street Pool” with his cousin Jeff and two friends. “A white man leaped out [of the cop car], clutching a gun in both hands, arms stretched out forward and stiff…he had to squat down to line up the bridge of my nose.”
