The Top Cities for Readers of African American Literature

Out of Print – Look out for the 2018 Edition assessed the relative strengths of almost 300 American cities, to determine which ones are best able to provide environments that are supportive of, and conducive to, the enjoyment of African American Literature. Our 2014 list improves on our original list, first published in 2013, by considering more factors for each city. Some of the factors we considered and evaluated included the: number of library visits per capita; number of African American book clubs; number of African American book stores; city having a minimum population of 100,000; percentage of African Americans relative to city’s overall population; number of book events for African American readers; number of African American owned newspapers; number of websites dedicated African American books (city of the web site’s founder); quality (length of visit, number of pages viewed, duration of stay) to the website, over the past 365 days; and more. We also took points away from cities with strong negative indicators for African American literacy as reflected on reports like, The Schott 50 State Report on Public Education and Black Males 2010. Finally, rather than ranking these cities, as we did last year, we decided to group the cities into tiers and sort the cities alphabetically within each tier. This article is intended to inform readers which cities are supportive of African American literature by providing the best resources for both readers and authors, and to acknowledge each city’s contribution to that effort.