From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs by Joshua Clark Davis (review)

Josh Davis’s From Head Shops to Whole Foods: The Rise and Fall of Activist Entrepreneurs is an ambitious and widely researched text. The witty title touches on two of the four activist groups and their attendant movements explored by Davis: head shops and their engagement with both the antiwar movement and the movement to legalize marijuana, and natural food markets that pivoted environ-mentalist, labor, and animal rights movements. These two sets of “activist entrepreneurs,” a term that Davis here coins, are joined by black bookstores and their relationship to both civil rights and Black Power, as well as feminist businesses that emerged from the feminist movement. The four sets of activist entrepreneurs, though widely divergent, come together in Davis’s work through a shared commitment to “participatory economics” or “the shared idea that citizens could regain power over their lives by making their daily experiences in capitalist society more humane, authentic, and even politically progressive or radical” (3).

Activist entrepreneurs are not new, as Davis points out. They have a long history stretching from the abolitionist movement, to labor organizations who “established cooperatively owned stores,” to feminists who sold both literature about the movement and memorabilia, to Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), among others. Yet, in the postwar era, Davis argues, activist businesses “far exceeded their predecessors in number, influence, and geographic reach” (17), believing “their businesses could serve the purposes of social movements and progressive change by emphasizing cooperation over competition and solidarity over sales margins” (29). This claim is also not new, though Davis gives it greater breadth. Most notably, scholars of African American history have begun to engage the subject, including The Economic Civil Rights Movement, edited by Michael Ezra, and The Business of Black Power, edited by Laura Warren Hill and Julia Rabig.¹ Davis gives such arguments new life in extending them to feminism, environmentalism, and head shops. He further argues that at the very moment the nation experienced postwar prosperity, young people, black people, women, and those promoting alternative lifestyle choices felt profound alienation from the center. As such, they sought avenues to change their circumstances, and the nation, through activist businesses.

In Chapter 2, “Liberation through Literacy: African American Bookstores, Black Power, and the Mainstreaming of Black Books,” Davis argues that black bookstore owners sought three ends: political knowledge and reeducation to ensure black self-determination and self-definition; black public spaces wherein African Americans (and others) could read, talk, engage in politics, and shop within a black environment; and the rejection of profit seeking as a motive for their businesses. Such bookstores sold literature to be sure, but also “dashikis, Afro-Sheen, and posters and T-shirts emblazoned with slogans of Black empowerment” (48). Many stores, according to Davis, achieved considerable success (economic and otherwise) until the mid-1970s, when the Black Power movement experienced a decline. The rise of mega- and online bookstores, which both carried books by black authors, contributed to the decline of black bookstores, and indeed most independent booksellers.

In Chapter 3, “The Business of Getting High: Head Shops, Countercultural Capitalism, and the Battle over Marijuana,” Davis suggests that head shop activist entrepreneurs were “critical supporters of the nascent movement to reform and eradicate the country’s drug laws,” but were “admittedly less connected to radical politics than other activist businesses were” (85). Like black bookstore owners, head shop owners understood themselves to be providing a community space, which could serve political ends, while they peddled their wares: marijuana paraphernalia, posters, buttons, and the Marijuana Review and High Times magazines. As marijuana use became increasingly mainstream, several states moved toward decriminalizing its use. The reaction was swift and severe as parent groups, suburban warriors in their own right, became increasingly outspoken and strategic in their targeting of head shops. According to Davis, few head shops were...