Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon has spent years pushing back against efforts to restrict books and how Black history is taught in the state’s public schools.

How Rep. Angie Nixon responded to Republican-led book bans in Florida

Those efforts eventually led Nixon to take the fight beyond the Florida Capitol and into her Jacksonville community. In 2024, she opened Café Resistance, a bookstore, coffee shop and community hub in Northwest Jacksonville, according to The Nation and VisitJacksonville.com.

The store features books by Black authors, books about Black history and titles that have faced challenges or removals in Florida schools.

“In 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis signed House Bill 1467, and Florida became the state with the most book bans in the country,” Nixon told The Nation. “So I stocked the books they tried to pull off the shelves. And Café Resistance was born.”

Nixon was elected to the Florida House in 2020 and became an outspoken critic of legislation affecting instructional materials in Florida schools. In March 2022, DeSantis signed HB 1467, stating that all classroom books should be reviewed by a district employee with a valid educational media specialist certificate to ensure they’re free of pornography or certain race-based teachings, CBS News reported.

Nixon told The Nation that she was defending “the freedom for our children to learn true history and not have books banned for political purposes.”

Café Resistance has since grown beyond books, offering free Black history lessons, tutoring, parenting and wellness workshops, guitar lessons, yoga and other community programming. Nixon has described the space as a community hub where residents can gather and learn.

“I tell people this isn’t my bookstore, this is our bookstore. This is the community bookstore,” she told The Jaxon.

Who is Angie Nixon?

The bookstore also reflects Nixon’s personal connection to literacy. She and her daughter co-authored The Adventures of Moxie McGriff when her daughter was 7 after Nixon said her daughter struggled with reading, per ActionNewsJax.

On Aug. 19, Nixon won Florida’s Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, defeating Alex Vindman. She will face Republican Sen. Ashley Moody in the November general election, Blavity reported.

Nixon remains a Florida state representative while campaigning for the Senate, but her bookstore began with a local response to the fight over books in Florida schools.

“They banned the truth, so we put it right here in the community,” Nixon told The Nation.