Photography by Ryan “Fivish” Cass

Onikah Asamoa-Caesar had a decision to make. After moving to Denver for a year, the former Tulsa teacher was looking to settle down and set up shop.  

She had spent two years in Oklahoma working for the nonprofit Teach for America, and wasn’t sure she wanted to plant roots back in Tulsa. She could rattle off a number of reasons why she believed it wouldn’t be good for her or her future child.   

Yet, Asamoa-Caesar couldn’t shake the feeling that Tulsa was calling her. During her previous time in the city, she had grown to appreciate its history, its people and its potential. Despite its various imperfections and issues, she came to believe Tulsa was where she needed to be to raise a family, start a business and be part of a community.  

“Tulsa is not for the faint of heart,” Asamoa-Caesar says. “It’s an amazing place and it’s also full of its own special, unique and not unique challenges. I came back to see my students and their families, and I just remember feeling like — this is community. It may not be exactly what I envisioned and imagined, but this is community. And in Tulsa, we can be a part of building that.”  

With the mission to increase intergenerational literacy and build a better community, Asamoa-Caesar moved back to Tulsa and started Fulton Street Books & Coffee in 2020.   

“I say that Fulton Street is not inspired by one thing. I think it’s really just a culmination of my experiences as a Black woman, as a Black girl growing up in this country,” she says. “I was born in New Jersey, I was raised in Southern California and I finished high school in Mississippi. And I think all of my life experiences kind of led me to this place to open a space that’s centered around literature literacy.”  

The spark for Asamoa-Caesar came during her time as a teacher in the Tulsa Public Schools system, when she saw how disinterested her students were in something she had always been passionate about.   

“I taught first grade at Gilcrease Elementary School and was very, very excited to teach reading and engage in books and exploring other worlds through the pages with my first graders,” Asamoa-Caesar says. “They were not excited. We got to reading and it was like someone threw a wet blanket over my party. I started to try to understand what is happening, why aren’t my little ones excited about reading? Reading was always my escape growing up. It was my safe place, and they were not having that experience.”  

What she learned forced her to make changes to her teaching methods.   

“When I started to try to peel back the layers to understand what is happening, ultimately my discovery was everything that I’m putting in front of my little ones denies them a world in which they exist,” says Asamoa-Caesar. “They’re not seeing themselves represented. I’m showing them a world in which they do not exist. And so I then started to work extra hard to diversify all of the literature and materials that I used in my classroom. That changed the culture of our classroom, and it changed the way that my students interacted with literature.”  

That belief in having diverse literature and learning stayed with Asamoa-Caesar and became the heart of Fulton Street Books & Coffee. From the first day she opened her doors to the public, she wanted to create a space that was inclusive and reflective of the entire community.    

“How do we create spaces where folks walk in and we show them a space, a world in which they exist, in which their identities, their language, their communities, their stories are represented and respected and upheld?” Asamoa-Caesar says. “And I think more recently it’s become a step further: This is not just a place where those stories and identities are welcome, but it’s a place where they’re centered. I always say at Fulton Street, we center the stories, the narratives, the lived experiences of Black, brown, Indigenous, queer and otherwise marginalized voices.”  

When Fulton Street opened, it was located in an area that Asamoa-Caesar described as challenging. But when the opportunity came to relocate the shop to the Greenwood District next to the Greenwood Rising History Center, she jumped at the chance to be on the actual ground of what had been Black Wall Street.  

However, the process tested her in ways that had her questioning whether she was on the right path.   

“Jumping through all of the hurdles as a Black entrepreneur is something that I was not spared from. So you’re navigating all of these things. We were closed for much longer than I imagined we would be. At one point I was very concerned that it may not happen. And then there were points where I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this. I’m just going to go back to the office. This is too hard. Why am I doing this?’ So it was definitely a, I don’t want to call it a defining moment, but it was a very chaotic, tumultuous wrestling with, ‘Is this what I’m supposed to be doing? Is it here? Is it time to let go?’ Just a lot of that in the downtime.”  

When it was all said and done and Fulton Street Books & Coffee reopened in its new location at 21 N. Greenwood Ave. in December, Asamoa-Caesar once again knew she was right where she needed to be: on the front lines.    

“When we think about everything that’s happening now, whether it’s book bans or censorship — they just banned dictionaries in a school county in Florida — this is why we exist,” Asamoa-Caesar says. “When we think about all of the conversations that came out around Black authors’ lack of representation just in the publishing industry, when we talk about all of the book bans, whether it’s in schools or libraries, this is why we exist. This is why this space is important.” •