Michigan Capitol | Susan J. Demas
Ed Vaughn, a former state House Democrat from Detroit, died on Tuesday. He was 90.
Vaughn served in the Michigan House during two stints in the late 1970s and 1990s until 2001. During his tenure, he was a leading opposition voice to the GOP-led state takeover of the Detroit Public Schools in 1999.
Vaughn’s Bookstore was owned by Ed Vaughn, who operated it between 1959 and the late 1990s. | Courtesy photo
He also owned Vaughn’s Bookstore for several decades in Detroit. It was located on Dexter Avenue for many years, and later Livernois Avenue on the city’s west side.
Vaughn’s Bookstore was one of the nation’s most significant publishers of Black poets, according to the National Park Service, which in 2021 awarded the Dexter Avenue site of the closed store a $15,000 grant designed to preserve history in underrepresented communities.
The store was also a space where African-American authors could hold reading and signing events and community members could host meetings. During the 1967 civil disturbance in Detroit, the bookstore was firebombed but reopened.
“We were a game-changer,” Vaughn told the Michigan Advance in 2021.
“People in the community had a place where they could buy books in their neighborhood and didn’t have to order them by mail.”
Vaughn, a Fisk University graduate and U.S. Army veteran, also served as an aide to former Detroit Mayor Coleman A. Young. Vaughn ran unsuccessfully for Detroit City Council in 1993 and Detroit mayor in 1997. The Alabama native moved to Dothan several years ago, where he headed a NAACP branch.
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