Best of Dallas 2025: Pan-African Connection Is Where History Won’t Be Hidden

For our Best of Dallas 2025 issue, celebrating banned books, we spoke with some of the players in Dallas’ book world, including Akwete Tyehimba from Pan-African Connection. Check back for our interview with Cassie Nova, a former drag storytime star, or check out our interview with Will Evans of Deep Vellum Books.

Look at PEN America’s list of books banned in some of the nation’s school libraries, and it’s not hard to spot a theme: Books about people of color and LGBTQ+ people are targets.

“During the 2023-2024 school year, 36% of all banned titles featured characters or people of color and a quarter (25%) included LGBTQ+ people or characters,” the literary/free speech group wrote earlier this year about the status of school book bans. “Erasure of identities is even clearer within certain types of books: 73% of all graphic and illustrated titles feature LGBTQ+ representation, people or characters of color, or discuss race or racism.”

Erase as hard as they might, book-banners seldom succeed in eliminating the words that capture the people, history and images they would rather bury. North Texans like Akwete Tyehimba, owner of Pan-African Connection Bookstore, Art Gallery and Resource Center, are devoted to ensuring that doesn’t happen.

For nearly 37 years, her bookstore, art gallery, clothing shop and community center has offered Dallas readers books written by and about Black people and culture not often found on the mass market.

“They’re trying to erase history,” Tyehimba says. “It can be erased if it’s not accessible.”

The Observer spoke with Tyehimba in a side area of her shop, next to a table lined with clothing from her son’s line of athletic wear. She runs Pan-African herself with help from her three grown children, maintaining a business created by her husband, Bandele Tyehimba, first at Jefferson Boulevard and Beckley Avenue in Oak Cliff before it moved east to Marsalis Avenue 10 years ago.

“It was really his idea … to dispel myths and replace negative images with positive ones, especially of our young ones,” she says.

She says it can become less accessible if readers don’t support independent bookstores.

When Bandele passed away in 2012, she was working for Delta Airlines. She retired a couple of years later to run the store to keep his goal alive.

Calling Pan-African a bookstore might seem strange once you step inside. Much of the store is filled with African carvings. There are racks of brightly dyed clothing, art on the walls and shelves of jewelry, oils and cosmetics. At the heart, though, is an extensive collection of books, and the center’s online shop highlights titles such as The Black Agenda: Bold Solutions for a Broken System, a collection of writings about racism and white supremacy in post-COVID America, edited by Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman. Books of poetry, fiction, history, memoirs and children’s books fill the list. Books are its biggest sellers, Tyehimba says, but “you don’t make a lot of profit out of books.” Items such as shea butter, cosmetics and health and wellness goods support the literary side of the business. More important is the support her store gets from being a long-term center offering programs for the community.  

“It’s a loyal base that wants to see us stick around,” she says. “…They do make sure they’re coming here to buy those books.”

She welcomes the growing number of independent bookstores that have opened over the nearly four decades of Pan-African’s existence. The economy, she says, is a “little scary” right now. With money tight and censors emptying bookshelves in school libraries, independents are needed to connect with their communities and keep the words and ideas flowing.

“You can buy those banned books here,” she says. “…That’s what we’re going to have to do, is support our local stores and buy those banned books.” 

4466 S Marsalis Ave., 214-943-8262, panafricanconnection.com