Alfred Ligon, 96; Started Oldest Black Bookstore

Alfred Ligon, founder of the country's oldest continuously operated black-owned bookstore whose belief in metaphysics eased his sorrow over the store's razing in the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, has died. He was 96.

Ligon died Saturday at Beverly Hospital in Montebello after a period of poor health, said longtime bookstore volunteer S. Pearl Sharp.

Ligon opened the Aquarian Book Shop in 1941 and watched its success rise and fall with society's interest in black history. Opened when Los Angeles' population was less than 5% African American, the store was ahead of its time in promoting black writers and cultural development.

Ligon opened the shop with $100 saved from his salary as a Southern Pacific Railroad waiter. He bought fiction, nonfiction and metaphysics books from a secondhand shop downtown. The store puttered along until the civil rights movement and corresponding interest in black history transformed the shop into a hub of cultural activity: lectures, classes on black history, small theatrical productions.

Works by Harlem Renaissance luminaries including Langston Hughes and hosted authors such as Alex Haley and Maya Angelou were well stocked. Ligon, who ran the shop with his wife, Bernice, also made available to researchers his collection of historic documents that included drafts of Marcus Garvey's speeches and letters of W.E.B. DuBois.

The Aquarian was a beacon to West Coast blacks searching for enrichment, said Angelou, who first visited the store in 1955. She admired the Ligons' courteous, graceful manner as much as their thorough selection.

"Their most ragged itinerant was treated with as much respect and elegance as well-dressed professionals or academics who came in there," she said by phone from her home in Winston-Salem, N.C.

For Los Angeles writer Earl Ofari Hutchinson, who started visiting the shop as a Los Angeles City College student in 1963, the store and its resources were a revelation at a time when Southern California was isolated from the civil rights mainstream.

"He created an environment of comfort and intellectual stimulation," Hutchinson said. "There were no pretensions about him, no ivory tower intellectualism. He strongly felt he had a duty to really be a solid mentor to young people and point them in the right direction in terms of understanding their past."

As interest in African American history faded and black bookstores around the country started closing, Ligon kept the shop open as a community service, he told The Times in 1982.