This week Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, sent a letter to their customers acknowledging the difficult times facing the community and affirming the store's commitment to supporting them. Flyleaf has generously allowed SIBA to reprint their letter:

Hi. Community check-in. Every day at our store we have the privilege of interacting with you, our friends and community members, in hundreds of small vignettes. Lately, when we ask how you are, we hear the same things: you're scared and exhausted. Our staff echoes your fears in our own conversations. You're not exaggerating. This is happening. It's only going to get more difficult.

This is a declaration of the store's ownership and management's commitment to supporting our community, especially its most vulnerable members. This means that Flyleaf Books is committed, first and foremost, to unflinching noncompliance with fascism in all forms.

We will not share any customer information with any government agency. 

We will never willingly volunteer any personal details about our customers to law enforcement and will fight any attempt to compel us.

We will fight censorship and advocate for the circulation of books that special interest groups seek to ban.

We will continue to work with local organizations to get books into the hands of kids who need books right now, especially those who need to see themselves in books.

We will never call immigration enforcement.

We will never tell you what bathroom to use.

We will stand for accessibility services and support community resources.

We will always ask ourselves how to reduce harm.

We will remain transparent, receptive, and accountable to feedback from you about our role, responsibilities, and our blind-spots.

We will remain in an open conversation about what we can and should be doing to resist.

For as long as our doors are open, we will continue to provide a place for readers and writers to come together, to read, to speak, to look at fun stickers, to bring your cute dogs (please!), to use the bathrooms, to meet, to escape, to experience joy or sorrow or fear or whatever you need to feel.

Despite everything, we have hope for this state and for our piece of it. This fight isn't new for us—it has simply emerged from the margins, where some people could ignore it, into a starker, less forgiving sun. Almost every day we hear about fear, it's true—but we also hear from folks who are organizing, who are resisting in ways both communal and personal; who are committed to survival, to radical love, to transformative justice, to doing the work. We hear about your protests, book clubs, D&D groups, zines, family trips, queer tarot readings, therapeutic initiatives, and everything else you have going on. Our mandate to be a resource is nonnegotiable and more vital than ever before in the history of our store, but also, it was always vital.

Stay safe. Hold each other close. Check in with one another. We're all we have.

Love,
Flyleaf Books