‘Boxville’: Shipping containers give local entrepreneurs a chance to get their start in Bronzeville
CHICAGO — Courtney Woods had a hard time relating to the characters in the books she read in school.
As a teenager in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood, she said she gravitated away from George and Lennie in “Of Mice and Men” and toward the books that lined her mother’s shelves — works by Richard Wright, Claude Thomas, Maya Angelou.
“I found that when I started reading about characters that looked like me — they had similar backgrounds as me, lived in similar settings and everything — it made reading so much more interesting,” Woods said.
Woods, 30, and her mother, Verlean Singletary, run a bookstore out of a shipping container in Bronzeville, on Chicago's near South Side, offering stories they hope speak to the surrounding community. Their store, Da Book Joint, specializes in Black literature from around the world.
They’re part of a cluster of six businesses in Bronzeville housed in brightly painted shipping containers — a 2017 initiative called . Located on the corner of 51st Street and Calumet Avenue, Boxville is part of Urban
