Interior of Negro store, Buffalo, N.Y.

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Shelves stocked with goods fill the walls of this interior, and the caption card identifies it as a store in Buffalo, New York, run by a Black proprietor. The card also notes that the photograph was shown in the American Negro exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900, which presented evidence of Black American life and enterprise to international visitors. Pictures like this one document the small businesses that Black Americans operated in northern cities around the turn of the century. The date of about 1899 is uncertain, as the question mark on the record indicates.

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