Missouri’s oldest Black bookstore just closed. The Kansas City Defender plans to reopen it as a newsroom and public archive.

Missouri’s oldest Black bookstore just closed. The Kansas City Defender plans to reopen it as a newsroom and public archive.

Willa Robinson has loved to read since she was a child. It’s a passion passed down from her father, who “read everything” and tended to fall asleep on Sunday afternoons with the newspaper over his face, she told me. The 84-year-old Robinson first began collecting books in the late 1970s, when she would spend her lunch hour in the bookstore up the street from the Kansas City Post Office where she worked. After she transferred to a downtown branch…