Annual Delaware Antiques Show 2019

Catharine Dann Roeber, Ph.D., is the Brock W. Jobe Associate Professor of Decorative Arts and Material Culture. The exhibition photographs, depicting locations across the United States, are a testament to entrepreneurial successes in the face of discrimination and segregation that unevenly targeted businesses owned and run by immigrant and non-white community members. One image of the Farmers & Workingmens Bargain Store in Oxnard, California, from 1922, bears a note on the back from the owners, brother and sister A. and Eloisa S. de Martinez, celebrating their new store and crediting their success to their “policy of square dealing, low prices, and good treatment regardless of nationality or race.” Another enterprise that catered to clientele regardless of race was the Spot Café in Wilmington, Delaware (fig. 5) . This jazz club, photographed in 1940, was located in the Royal Hotel, which was listed in the Negro Motorist Green Book, a national guide to places accepting of African Americans during the Jim Crow era. The Spot Café photo was taken by Henry Szymanski, a Polish American teen who used his Kodak Brownie camera to capture many black businesses in Wilmington and the surrounding area in the 1930s and 1940s. Whether taken by a young, emerging photographer like Szymanski or one of the scores of unknown photographers who were active in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photographs of businesses reflect a wide array of experiences characterizing American entrepreneurship. Come see these historical gems through January 5 in the Winterthur Galleries. Fig. 5. Spot Café, Henry Szymanski, photographer, 703 French Street, Wilmington, Delaware, March 20, 1940. Silver gelatin print. Szymanski Collection, Courtesy Delaware Historical Society 2003.15.228 — 130 —