This week’s column was supposed to be a celebration. A celebration of a wonderful little toy store in a joyful Midwestern town. A store that, heartbreakingly, is scheduled to close the week after Christmas. But circumstances intervened.
Yellow Springs, Ohio, is the kind of place that makes you smile the moment you step onto its main street. The kind of Main Street Generation X—and every generation before us—assumed would always exist. The kind that, to my children’s generation, now feels less like a living place and more like a memory: something America once built everywhere, and now struggles to protect anywhere.
For decades, Yellow Springs resisted the fate that hollowed out so many towns like it. Its downtown endured in large part because of Antioch College, the pathbreaking liberal arts school founded by 19th-century education reformer Horace Mann. Mann believed deeply in education. He did not believe in endowments. The result is a college that still stands for bold ideas, even as it has struggled financially in recent years.
The town itself has fared better. Not by accident. In no small part because Dave Chappelle invested in it—not just money, but belief. Belief that culture matters. That joy matters. That small towns are worth loving. Even as he mourns the loss of a beloved local store, he continues to pour his presence, his resources, and his faith into keeping the town alive.
Recently, I was back in town to see Dave perform at his new club. My parents helped recruit his father to teach at Antioch in the late 1960s. So this place has always felt personal. Rooted. Shared.
We were talking in a local coffee shop when Jamie Sharp walked in. She owns the Yellow Springs Toy Company—the store that has probably generated more smiles than any other place on the block. The kind of store that feels like childhood made visible. Wooden toys. Books. Games. Objects chosen with care. A place that invites wonder instead of noise.
Jamie told us she was closing the store. I asked why. I thought of the last time I took my son there. He loved it. Everyone did. You could feel it in the room. The quiet joy that comes from a place built not to extract, but to give.
Jamie did not speak in abstractions. She spoke plainly. Tariffs had raised costs. Online giants had tightened margins. And then she said the thing that mattered most. People just do not seem to have as much money this year.
But what stayed with me was what she did not say. This was not surrender. This was not bitterness. Dave told her to stay in touch. And it was clear she is an entrepreneur who loves her town—someone closing one chapter, not abandoning the story. Home still matters. And this is almost certainly not her last act.
That understanding traveled with me.
After I returned home, I spoke with a friend who owns a paddleboard factory in Florida. Orders still come in for his most expensive models—the ones bought by people with yachts. But the middle is gone. The heart of his business has vanished. He named the paddleboard and kayak companies that have failed as middle-class families quietly pull back from anything that feels optional.
The NAACP and the National Urban League have warned that Black unemployment has surged this year, now topping 8 percent. That matters. It always does. But it does not, by itself, explain what is happening on Main Streets—or at a factory in Florida.
Something broader is moving beneath the surface.
For generations, Black Americans have said that when white America gets a cold, we get pneumonia. What is striking now is how widely the symptoms are spreading. Economic fragility has moved beyond the places segregation and redlining engineered it into. It is showing up on Main Streets. In small businesses. In kitchen-table conversations across this country.
Look closely at the numbers and you see what economists call nuanced joblessness. The unemployment rate looks manageable. But beneath it are families working fewer hours than they need. Earning less than they used to. Falling behind as costs rise. Quietly losing ground.
Taken together, it is hard not to feel we are standing near the edge of a recession. Families feel it first. Small businesses feel it next. Wall Street always feels it last.
This was not the story I planned to tell when I set out to write this column. It was supposed to be an interview with Ms. Sharp. A celebration of a store and all the smiles it created over the years. But when I reached out, she told me she could not do the interview. Not mine. Not anyone’s. Ending this chapter was painful. The messages she sent were gracious. And heavy.
As I read them, and reflected on my conversations with her—and my friend who owns the factory—I felt something else settle in. We may be entering a season of deeper economic pain. For families. For workers. For shop owners. For towns like these. For all of us.
Still, what endures is what people choose to build. Thank you, Jamie Sharp.
Thank you to your store—for all the smiles, the joy, and the childhoods it helped shape. And thank you to those who choose to stay. To invest. To keep faith. People like Dave Chappelle, Jamie Sharp, and so many others who believe that small towns—and the people who love them—are worth fighting for.
There are always better days ahead for the America we build with love.
Ben Jealous is a former national president of the NAACP and a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania.
