Marshall Taylor reading from “Children Learn What They Live” by Dorothy Law Nolte during an interview for Channel 22.

by Leo Adam Biga

The late Marshall Taylor devoted the last three decades of his life to making the independent Aframerican Bookstore a rich cultural resource in a transitional urban landscape.

83-year-old Taylor died July 7 after an undisclosed illness. He’s survived by his wife, Annlattea “Annette” Green-Taylor. The couple has been a fixture at the 3226 Lake Street store whose impact extends far beyond the brick and mortar shop. It has operated as a community clearinghouse and salon for all things Afrocentric, including books, art, apparel, classes, and forums. Several nonprofit organizations have held meetings there and it has served as a platform for Black pride expressions and for social-political-historical-intellectual discourse.

The way Omaha native Paul Bryant sees it, the store has filled the same broad community functions as other cultural “embassies” such as the old Fair Deal Cafe, Goodwin’s Spencer Street Barber Shop, the Omaha Star, Big Mama’s and Culxr House.

Taylor grew up with Jim Crow restrictions in small-town Georgia before his field of view expanded courtesy an Air Force career that took him around the globe. His world also opened through reading Black authors whose work offered a truer, deeper understanding of Black history than mainstream books.

He eventually landed at Offutt Air Base in Bellevue. He retired in 1975 as a chief master sergeant and made Nebraska home. The social entrepreneur started Lilmar Beauty Services in Bellevue and North Omaha. The front of the North O location included a small bookstore reflective of Taylor’s own intense interest in African American and African history, literature, art, religion, and more.

Taylor met his future wife, Annette, when she worked as a nail technician in the beauty shop and helped on the book side. The pair found in each other a shared curiosity and passion for learning and celebrating heritage. As they grew their personal collection and commercial inventory of Black artifacts, the beauty shop gave way to a community room and larger bookstore footprint.

Between them, the couple blended their seven children as well as multiple grandchildren and great-grandchildren into a family.

Taylor earned a public administration degree from the University of Oklahoma while in the service, but when it came to Black identity and history, he educated himself. He made the store a safe space where visitors could pursue their own identity journeys. He formally launched the store in 1990. Business slowed by the 2000s before rebounding in this woke Black Lives Matter (BLM) era feting Afrocentric themes and Black businesses.

The physical store shut down in March due to concerns with the coronavirus, though online sales continued. Through the quarantine and Taylor’s illness and subsequent death, the store has remained closed but continues filling online orders.

Since its start through BLM’s emergence in 2014, the surrounding neighborhood has seen vast changes, including the construction of the new Salem Baptist Church worship center and the Miami Heights development and the razing of the Hilltop and Pleasantview public housing projects. Highlander village occupies those former housing project sites.

Through all the change, from gang street violence to revitalization and gentrification, Taylor remained steadfast in his commitment to community. Whatever was happening outside, Bryant said, the store offered “different Afrocentric items you couldn’t find elsewhere in Omaha.”

Like others who intersected with the man and the venue, Paul Bryant admired Taylor as a font of wisdom eager to share what he knew and to let visitors make their own discoveries.

Taylor articulated the mission on the store website: “...to promote the distribution of literary works uplifting to the spirit and to the community” and “to continue the historical role Black bookstores have played in providing conscious-raising literature about issues, history, and religion.”

He and Annette believed “a people who know themselves usually do better about themselves.”

“He was very passionate about our history and culture and he wanted to spread that knowledge to others. That’s why he invested in that bookstore,” said Bryant, who now resides in Atlanta. “He was a strong Black man. What does that mean? It means he had an opinion and he wasn’t afraid or shy about voicing that opinion.”

In Taylor, Bryant saw the same mettle displayed by two prominent Black leaders who recently died.

“When you look at people like the late John Lewis and C.T. Vivian – who were of the same generation as Marshall Taylor – they were leaders who stood up. Most leaders, I fear, are quiet and reserved. They wait and see what the powers that be want to do and which way the wind blows. But there’s another type that speaks out regardless, without waiting, and Mr. Taylor was that kind of guy. That sort of strong male leadership is lacking, not just in Omaha, but nationally.”

Bryant ran an inner-city leadership academy near the bookstore and made a point of exposing his young charges to Taylor’s strong messages filled with “intelligence and merit.”

“He taught Black history classes for our students pro bono. He did that out of passion and love to spread knowledge onto another generation,” said Bryant.

Felicia Webster, aka WithloveFelicia, credits her formation as a conscious Black person to the proprietor, his wife, and their wares.

“They were a very important part of my journey. As a teenager, I used to go to the bookstore because I was interested in who I was as a young Black girl and the history of my people. The bookstore became a fortress for me of knowledge and wisdom. Mr. Marshall and Miss Annette embraced me and I was opened to a world that allowed me to learn so much about who I was and how vast I am in being a woman of African descent and what that looks like living in America,” she said.

As a writer and spoken word artist, Webster immersed herself in the store’s literary offerings.

“I lived in the bookstore.”

Her awakening began there and continued back East, where a connection she made at the store led to a life-changing meeting.

Screencapture from africanbookstore.net based in Florida

“There was one book, in particular, Afrikan People and European Holidays (subtitled A Mental Genocide) by Ishakamusa Barashango. I read that in the bookstore, and when I moved to the East Coast I met Barashango. I became close with him and his fiancé. I was in their wedding and performed at it. So the link is powerful. The bookstore gave birth to opportunities I just never imagined.”

Webster echoes others in describing Taylor as a sentinel and seminal figure who let his actions speak louder than his words.

“Mr. Marshall was humble and quiet and yet dynamic and powerful. He will be missed,” Webster said. “I know his spirit lives forever in this community in all of the lives he touched. I’m honored I got to be a part of his journey and he could be a part of mine.”

As this reporter can attest, Taylor also shunned the spotlight. He firmly but politely declined multiple of my interview requests over the years.

Writer Walter Brooks said he found “my home away from home” when he moved to Omaha. He marveled at the Taylors’ ability to maintain their indie operation amid widespread bookstore closings. “Little funky North Omaha has sustained a Black bookstore whereas there’s not a single Black bookstore in cities with larger Black populations.” That success, he said, spoke volumes about the couple’s resolve and vision and their customers’ devotion.

In 2019 Brooks wrote, “Aframerican is shaping up to be a national treasure, not just a Nebraska one.”

Annette Taylor has indicated she plans on reopening the physical store. Bryant suggests an outside the box idea for preserving its unusual holdings: annexing it into the public library system. “I don’t know how that would happen,” he said, “but it would be nice if some public tax dollars went to supporting a business that has that focus. I guarantee its Afrocentric books and authors are wider and larger than the public library’s.”

Webster insists it’s premature to speculate on the store’s long-term future. “Miss Annette in time will make a decision on what that looks like moving forward. Right now it’s just time to pause and celebrate Mr. Marshall’s life.”

A Celebration of Life event for Taylor was held July 18 at the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation visitors center. Webster performed a tribute to Taylor.

The center was an apt site for the celebration because Taylor served on the foundation’s board for many years,

Sharif Liwaru, center, former president of Malcolm X Memorial Foundation/Photo: Facebook

“We are extremely thankful for his contribution, leadership and encouragement to the next generation,” MXMF president Leo Louis II posted on the event’s Facebook page.

Former MXMF president Sharif Liwaru, who now lives in Portland, Oregon, considered Taylor a valued “mentor and elder.” He spoke at the celebration of life ceremony.

Liwaru and others received fatherly advice from Taylor and those lessons still reverberate. “I’ve learned from wise men I can measure myself in a variety of ways,” Liwaru said. “Brother Taylor measures highly and through him we receive advice. He coached rather than tried to solve your problems. He more often showed you advice rather than told you.”

In the area of building and exhibiting high character, Liwaru said he learned from Taylor to “give credit, take the blame” and to “know the people around you well.”

“He knew you by your character, not your words, eloquence, or title.”

When it comes to duty, Liwaru takes to heart Taylor’s edicts: “If you are going to do it, do it right” and “your outputs should show you take pleasure in work.” Liwaru adopted Taylor’s penchant for “professional skepticism” and “attention to detail.”

Aframerican Bookstore at 3226 Lake St, Omaha, NE 68111

As an ex-military man, Taylor valued promptness. In his book, there was no excuse for being late. Likewise, Liwaru said, Taylor carefully apportioned his time. “Time with him was precious and you knew you were really getting something when he stopped what he was doing to work with you.”

Taylor’s personal code extended to memberships. “He didn’t join just any organization,” Liwaru said. “It had to be worthy.”

Liwaru admired the way the efficient, well-organized, old-school Taylor “kept things simple” with post-it notes, ledgers, and a manual calculator. “It’s in these ways he said, I love you. In measuring high in these same areas, we say ‘I love you, too, Brother Taylor.’”

Taylor meant to write a book about his life and philosophy. Though he never got around to it, his impact and legacy are felt through the people he touched and their own writing.

Historian and educator Tekla Ali Johnson, an Omaha native, felt Taylor’s impact on a personal and professional level. She shared exclusively with NOISE the following portrait of this complex man:

“Baba (wise man, father) Marshall Taylor has joined the ancestors. Asked what he meant to me, a Black woman, writer, teacher, historian from North Omaha … Marshall Taylor was an intellectual giant, one who did (as Audre Lorde suggests) ‘put his strength in the service of his vision.’ Mr. Taylor's love for his people and his quest for our liberation were his life's work. His constancy at educating us to an accurate view of our true historical identity, and to revealing the lies and misinformation told to and about us by slave masters and their descendants, took several forms. He provided us with ancient and modern texts – an oasis filled with our own content from our own ways of knowing – in a conservative state with an overwhelming white majority who teach a history written to tell their own view of the world.

Mr. Taylor did not stop with books, but sponsored book clubs, reading groups, and actively provided leadership at the Malcolm X Center.

Although intensely private, Mr. Taylor was also warm, generous, and courageous. I met Mr. Taylor at least 25 years ago when working on the campaign to free Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter. Mr. Taylor added his signature to petitions, corresponded with Mondo, and demanded the release of Omaha's longest-held political prisoners when few would publicly speak their support for our captured revolutionaries.

Mr. Taylor also helped me learn and teach about my people. In my 20s he was one of the few Nebraskans who I could talk to at length about the Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, Egypt: Child of Africa, The African Origin of Civilization, From Superman to Man, and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

Later, during my graduate school experience at UNL in a history department which had never granted a Ph.D. to any African American, I was ideologically a fish out of water. Mr. Taylor by this time had a partner and wife, Ms. Annette, and this power couple continued quietly to support my intellectual growth and groundedness as well as that of hundreds and perhaps thousands of other African Americans in Nebraska and beyond, via conversation and historical and contemporary texts, as well as through shared activism.

Mr. Taylor's legacy? An independent thinker, a major 20th-21st century intellectual, a teacher, the founder of an African Diasporic bibliographic collection (yes, in the Midwest USA), a Pan-Africanist whose Aframerican Bookstore planted its roots deep in the people's history, in the heart of the community, where the people drink self-knowledge and cultural strength like clean cool water. He will be missed.”

Tekla Ali Johnson

Director, History Program

Co-Coordinator of Africana Studies Minor

Harris-Stowe State University (St. Louis, MO)

Co-Director

Southern Preservation Center (Charlotte, NC)

Visit aframericanbookstore.com.

Remembering Marshall Taylor: Founder of the Aframerican Bookstore

by Leo Adam Biga