BmoreArt

For 17 years, Red Emma’s has created community and preserved it. The cooperative book store, coffee shop, bar, and radical space named after anarchist Emma Goldman began with a lofty goal, John Duda, one of its founding members, explains: “Let’s create an institution that could be self-sustaining and let’s run this thing as democratically as we want the world to be run.”

Back in 2003, Duda was one of many running the volunteer-only anarchist Fells Point bookstore Black Planet Books which had operationally and ideologically hit a wall. “People involved realized if everything is done on a volunteer-only basis, there was no vision of financial stability,” Duda says.

Red Emma’s would be a resource center that could, through book and cafe sales, actually pay its workers and stick around and provide continuity in a fractious, segregated, and siloed city seemingly always on the verge. Established in 2004 amid a burst of energy imagining alternatives to corporate globalization and opposing the Iraq War, Red Emma’s played a major role in local Occupy Wall Street organizing, and later as a flashpoint during Ferguson-related protests in Baltimore and Baltimore Uprising-related activities.

“I think there’s an interesting role that institutions themselves play in collective memory,” Duda says. “Institutions like Red Emma’s and other spaces provide what’s in between those moments, where people are going to reconvene and reflect and reorganize.”

A cooperative rather than collective (a wall lists all of its worker-owners and when they began), Red Emma’s tweaks the sometimes oppositional, puritanical perspective of radicalism, expanding without compromising. When its basement space on St. Paul Street became too small, they moved to a larger North Avenue bookstore/restaurant location in 2013. In 2018, they moved to an even larger space on Cathedral Street with a bookstore on one floor, and a cafe and bar on the other.

“We made the decision to pull the bookstore and restaurant apart physically,” Duda says, “so that we could do both of those things better.”

With its expansive vegetarian menu, well-curated book selection, and event space with a serious focus on literary talks, there’s something subversive about Red Emma’s as it infiltrates the city establishment, getting a little respectable along the way (their Radical Book Fair, which began in 2006, is now part of Baltimore Bookfest proper with its own Radical Book Pavillion). In Baltimore, inundated with businesses and nonprofits offering up change-agent language and not always delivering, Red Emma’s mining of the important if less provocative elements of radical politics—sustainability, inclusivity, a place to meet people and keep on meeting them—matters, whether you’re looking for a new book published by Verso, a cheap cup of coffee, or just a plug to charge your phone.

“I know one of the things you encounter through archives of past social movements is the charismatic leader and the dramatic protest actions,” Duda says. “But if you dig a little deeper there’s a whole structural history to social movements: the bars that people met at, the union halls where people would celebrate and mobilize.”

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Header photo by E. Brady Robinson for BmoreArt Issue 08: Archive, Fall 2019. Pictured left to right: John Duda, Eden Szilagyi, Lanie Thomas, Moss Froom, Whitney Roberts, Kate Khatib, Sam Duda, and Cullen Nawalkowsky, all worker-owners (except Sam)