When Alexis Pauline Gumbs thought she’d lent all her copies of The Salt Eaters to friends, she called every bookstore in her area to find another copy. But none of them carried the book — Toni Cade Bambara's classic novel about black people searching for healing — and that didn’t sit right with Gumbs.

Her fruitless search underscored a deeper grievance about the unavailability of black feminist texts, both in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina where she lives and more broadly. Frustrated, she resolved to do something about it.

Gumbs, a queer, black feminist author, had already been running a lending and reference library out of her home for several years. Dubbed "The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind," the library served as an outgrowth of personal collections from Gumbs and locals Julia Roxanne Wallace and Courtney Reid-Eaton. Bolstered by book donations and other projects in which the three were involved, they’d lend classic texts and let people peruse hard-to-find titles. The trio had talked about their shared fantasy of creating a bookmobile and taking it on the road, especially around their local community. With the Durham Public Library under renovation until 2020 and the selections at local stores lacking, Gumbs and her counterparts decided to take action: The trio is transforming an Airstream trailer into what Gumbs called “a tiny, black feminist nerd utopia.”

There used to be a lot more feminist bookstores. Proliferating in the 1970s and '80s, they popped up across North America, often run by lesbians and women of color. But by the 1990s, the movement had started to decline. A similar proliferation occurred with radical, black-owned bookstores during the height of the Black Power movement in the U.S., with their popularity fading by the beginning of the 1980s, before a resurgence in the early '90s, according to The Atlantic. Now, a new trend is emerging in their place: mobile, black-owned book operations, most of them feminist and politically radical.

Gumbs’ Black Feminist Bookmobile is one of them. Alongside Wallace and Reid-Eaton, she’s fundraising $10,000 to get the Airstream up and running. When it’s ready, the bookmobile will function as a lending and reference library rather than a store.

Gumbs said the project has grown from the legacy of feminist bookstores. She grew up in Atlanta, where she frequented Charis Books & More, a feminist bookstore founded in 1974 that still stands, and that Gumbs called a “profoundly supportive space.”

“I grew up in Atlanta, and I grew up at the bookstore,” Gumbs told Teen Vogue, adding that the writing workshops she attended at Charis were “foundational” to her. “I started to identify as a black feminist there.”

Without its example, she said, she wouldn’t have dreamed up the Black Feminist Bookmobile.

Gumbs' Black Feminist Bookmobile isn’t the first of its kind. In 2014, Brooklyn native OlaRonke Akinmowo launched the Free Black Women’s Library. On the last Sunday of every month, Akinmowo installs the books somewhere like an art gallery or a community center. All of the books are written by black women, and it functions as a free library where people access the collection by bringing a donation to trade for something else.