The paragraphs below are quoted from Rosalee McReynolds and Louise S. Robbins’ The Librarian Spies:

The Washington Bookshop was the special object of Martin Dies’s [chair of HUAC] wrath. Formed as a cooperative in 1938, the [Washington Cooperative] bookshop offered books and phonograph records to its members at a substantial discount, but it was more than a business venture. It was a social club, an art gallery, and a lecture hall. Many of the members were federal employees who had moved to Washington, D.C., for wartime jobs and found themselves starved for companionship and a cultural life. In return for their annual dues of one dollar, members could attend lectures and concerts for free. One former member reminisced in the 1990s about the pleasure she derived from playing the violin in the Bookshop’s string quartet…

Dies seized upon reports that the bookshop sold the Daily Worker and works by Marx and Engels. He chose to ignore ample evidence that in most respects the bookshop’s stock resembled that of other Washington area bookstores like Brentano’s and Ballantyne’s. Major publishing houses and book distributors attested that shipments to the Washington Bookshop were similar to those sent to these other bookstores. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf himself wrote a memo to the shop’s trustees saying “It
would be impossible for us to distinguish between your purchasing and that of any other bookshop of your size”…

In the opinion of Selma Williams, herself the subject of a federal loyalty-security investigation, it was this absence of a color bar at the bookshop that most rankled Dies. Washington, D.C., was still very much a southern city in the early 1940s, and the bookshop was unique in that it admitted members irrespective of race or religion.

Bookshop members were openly proud of their nondiscriminatory policies. As Angus McDonald, one of the founders, wrote at the height of the investigations: “We tried to be liberal. We said we favored anything that was democratic. In the constitution that we drew up we tried to follow the good old United States Constitution. We said we wouldn’t keep anybody out because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. In other words, if a man was a member of the National Association of Manufacturers or had even been in Congress, we said that if he came down and wanted to turn over a new leaf that we would forget about his past.”