Dusty Baker walked into Marcus Books in Oakland, the oldest Black-owned independent bookstore in the country, and felt the spirit of his mother.

Marcus Books, at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Way and 39th Street, features books, posters, and art of Black authors and civil rights leaders. A who’s who of visitors were in the shop over the decades, either to promote a book or simply drop by:

Muhammad Ali, Rosa Parks, B.B. King, Oprah Winfrey, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Patti LaBelle, and a bit more recently Steph Curry.

Along with prominent authors Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Audre Lorde, whose words are seen on the front window: “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

It’s part bookstore, part museum, part classroom, part hub of African American culture, literature, and history.

Thus, the presence of Johnnie B. Baker Jr., whose new book, “Crossroads: A Memoir in Baseball and Life,” was published last week.

”When I look around here, I really see my mom,” Baker said. “I see my dad, too. But I really see my mom.”

Baker’s mother, Christine, encouraged a young Dusty to read soul-searching books, bought him tickets to the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, made Hank Aaron promise her that he’d take care of her teenage son after he signed his first pro contract, and told him as a kid, “You can’t be just as good as everyone else, you’ve gotta be twice as good to accomplish the same thing.”

Christine Baker listened to Lou Rawls, Johnny Mathis, and Mahalia Jackson and was drawn to Malcolm X, whose picture she hung on a wall.

Johnnie B. Baker Sr. listened to Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk and gravitated toward Martin Luther King’s vision and leadership ideals.

“As a breadwinner, he had to be more tolerant,” Baker said. “My parents were determined to give me the tools to think for myself about what was happening and never be afraid to stand up for what was right. I was a combination of both and would later go through a period at about age 15 where I wanted to change my name.”

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“To Dusty X.”

Naturally, his dad, a true disciplinarian, put the kibosh on that idea.

“At the time, the revolution was alive,” Baker said. “My dad said, ‘I brought you into this world, and I’ll take you out of it.’ ”

Baker appeared at Marcus Books on Sunday as part of a series of promotional conversations at Northern California bookstores. At this particular event, he joined Monte Poole, who engineered the conversation as the longtime eminent Oakland Tribune columnist and now covers the Warriors as a writer/analyst at NBC Sports Bay Area.

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Baker spoke of his life’s fascinating journey, which is keenly chronicled in “Crossroads,” written with Steve Kettmann and touching on his family, his playing career (including Aaron’s influence), and his managing career (starting with the Giants and moving to four other teams, his eventual ticket to the Hall of Fame).

Visitors arrived to the sounds of John Coltrane on saxophone performing “Like Sonny,” and some chatted with the welcoming proprietors, Blanche Richardson and her daughter, Cherysee Calhoun. Blanche’s parents, Julian and Raye, founded the bookstore, which initially opened in 1960 as a San Francisco print shop named after the Jamaican-born political activist Marcus Garvey.

“My grandparents created the store as a place for Black folks to come and learn about themselves, a safe place to have discussions on what’s going on in the world,” Calhoun said. “We hold events that we think are important for the community to be exposed to, so it’s a bring-some, get-some kind of vibe.”

Baker felt it. He knew all about Garvey (the activist in this case, not the first baseman) from books his mother presented to him.

“This is perhaps the greatest bookstore that I have ever seen,” Baker told the packed crowd early in the event.

In “Crossroads,” Baker guides the reader from his early days in Riverside, where he grew up the eldest of five children in a diverse community and built friendships with kids of multiple races, to an all-white high school in Carmichael, just outside Sacramento, to his bouts with racism playing pro ball in the South, to a career as a distinguished and esteemed baseball lifer.

Baker has had countless encounters with famous people in and mostly out of baseball to the extent that Poole called his life “Forrest Gumpish” and added, “He’s been so many places, done so many things, met so many people, made friends with so many people that it’s like the title of the old movie ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’”

To which Baker said, “That’s on my wall in my kitchen,” a picture from the final scene in the movie that hits home about his own life, the part about helping people but also the part about hardships in business and relationships. It serves as a reminder that his life wasn’t always wonderful.

Baker faced many challenges including in his teens. His parents divorced a year after the family moved from Riverside, though in retrospect, he said, “I had the strongest parents in the world.” He had a fallout that lasted several years with his father, who wanted him to go to college rather than sign with the Braves. And the racially motivated experiences early in his pro career were never forgotten but provided a more worldly path for his future.

There was the time in Shreveport, La., in 1968 when he was out at night with a white teammate and his wife; when Dusty and the woman walked outside, a cop pulled up and said, “Boy, don’t you know it’s against the law for a Black man to be on the streets after dark with a white woman?”

Baker got pulled over in Mississippi with California license plates and was told by the cop, “Where you going, boy? You drivin’ mighty fast.” Baker didn’t appreciate the intent, and it was a good thing he was with teammate Ralph Garr, who grew up in the South and told Baker to be cool and avoid a serious incident.

Another time in the South, Baker learned of so-called sundown laws, which obliged Black people to be off the streets by 9 p.m. He’d go watch “Gunsmoke” at teammate Bob Didier’s place but always had to leave by 8:45. “I never saw the end of ‘Gunsmoke,’” said Baker, who’d go to Didier the next day to get caught up.

“It was a culture shock, but we had our own society, protecting each other,” Baker said. “We’d go to other towns, and the Black players would take you out, tell you where to go, where not to go. Sometimes we not only had trouble with white people, we had trouble with Black people because they could tell we weren’t from there.”

Racism followed Baker to the big leagues, and it was never more evident than when Aaron was chasing down Babe Ruth’s career home run record. Baker was on deck when Aaron hit his iconic 715th homer, and Baker vividly chronicles the historic series of events in his book.

“It was terrible for him,” Baker said. “He would get these [hate] letters. Ralph Garr and I would read some of them. A guy was gonna shoot him today. Or if he hit a homer today, something bad was gonna happen. The thing about Hammer, all those threats made him stronger, made him concentrate even harder.”

Reading “Crossroads” is a deep dive into Baker’s world and American history, the kind of story that deserves to be on a big screen. In a Q&A toward the end of the event, Baker was asked if a movie or documentary could be in the works, and he shared the story of an English kid who used to wash his car when he was playing for the Dodgers.

That kid, Graham King, went on to be a film producer who worked on “Bohemian Rhapsody,” “The Aviator,” and “Hugo,” and another that earned him an Academy Award, “The Departed.” He also produced “Michael,” the new film about Michael Jackson.

So, yes, conversations are underway, and there’s even talk of Darren Baker playing the role of his father, but no deal is close to being struck.

“He wants to do a movie,” Baker said. “I don’t know if I want that. I don’t like watching myself.”

For now, it’s plenty good that he’s writing about himself.