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Winnette’s Dresses windows not broken
20 Mar 1935, Wed Daily News (New York, New York) Newspapers.comIn the photograph from the night of the disorder, Winnette's Dresses appears in the background, behind two white police officers. One officer is dragging a Black man sitting on the ground, who the caption identifies as having been arrested. Four signs attached to the store windows are visible, all reading "COLORED STORE." Those windows are not damaged. The caption asserts the signs are to "protect [the store] from raiding marauders." That reference comes at the end of the caption, which focuses attention on the police, and the gun just visible in the right hand of the patrolman in the foreground: "Grim Work! Policeman at left draws his revolver as the rioters grow increasingly ugly. His comrade is dragging a recalcitrant rioter off to prison."
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Three additional signs are visible in the image taken the morning after the disorder published in the Afro-American, also reading "COLORED STORE." Those signs are the focus of that photograph, not a background, framed by passersby likely asked to pose. Four Black boys face the camera on one side of the window, and a Black man looks at the window, with his back to the camera, on the other side. In the context of the damages stores around it on Lenox Avenue, where reported broken windows and looting was concentrated, it is the intact windows of Winnette's dress shop that make it worthy of being photographed. "The store was not touched," the Afro-American captioned the photograph. The Associated Press explicitly connected the window signs and the state of the windows with a caption that asserted that the signs "saved this shop from destruction."
The full name of the store is visible in the uncropped version of the photograph published in the Afro-American. Almost a year earlier, Johns had used Winnette's Dresses as an example of a Black-owned business that Harlem's Black residents should be patronizing instead of going to the white-owned Blumstein's department store:
By April 1940, when the census was taken, Leo and Winifred Richards lived at 1 West 126th Street; if that was also their home in 1935, it was only a block east of Winnette's Dresses. Whether they were in the store or at home when the disorder began, they would have been well-placed to put signs on the windows. Both were born in the West Indies around 1901. They may not have been formally married in 1940, as the census enumerator recorded Winifred as a lodger, and her last name as Coward, while also recording both she and Leo as married. Winifred is identified as the source of that information. Leo's occupation is recorded as dress shop manager, Winifred's as a dress maker employed in a dress factory, indicating that the store was not bringing in sufficient income to support them both, as had been the case in 1934.At 340 Lenox Avenue (southeast corner of 127th Street) is a neat little ladies dress shop. In it you will find Leo and Winifred Richards, a cultured, educated young couple who offer to their race a fine assortment of dresses, hats, hosiery and gloves. The[y] call it “Winnette’s-Exclusive but not Expensive.” Their tale, my friends is a sad one. For two years they have managed to keep their doors open at an awful sacrifice of health and energy. One or the other has always been forced to work as a menial downtown so as to help balance the books. The goods they sell as in every way as good as Blumstein’s and the prices just as cheap, and yet in that two years thousands of Negroes have passed by their door and walked to 125th street to spend thousands of dollars at Blumstein’s. Mrs Richards told me she tried to have at least one colored girl but her small sales couldn’t stand it.
Winnette's Dresses is at 340 Lenox Avenue in the MCCH business survey from the second half of 1935, although identified as a Black-owned "Hoisery shop" not by name. It is still at that location when it was photographed by the Tax Department between 1939 and 1941.