By Rachel Sawicki

WILMINGTON — Dr. Hara Wright-Smith’s latest publication, “Images of America: African Americans of Wilmington’s East Side,” takes a deep dive into that community’s atmosphere during segregation.

As she thinks about the process of writing the book, Dr. Wright-Smith said her mission was to ensure that East Side families were in the foreground.

“Like, how do I ensure that I can lift this community up, and the social and economic and political prowess they had, during a time when Jim Crow laws prohibited African Americans from doing so many things?” she said. “I had to make sure that not only their voices but ... the images showed how successful they were in ensuring they had the social, political and economic foundation in place, despite all of what they were dealing with in the Jim Crow era.”

Dr. Wright-Smith has a background in business but found her true passion in community service. She now has a Ph.D. in city and regional planning and certifications in neighborhood revitalization.

She’s dedicated the last 20 years of her career to neighborhoods across the nation, advocating for affordable housing and economic development, even spending some time as a tenure-track professor teaching entrepreneurship. Now, she is the director of economic development and inclusion of the nonprofit Wilmington Alliance.

She grew up in Rosegate, a small, predominantly Black community in New Castle, similar to Wilmington’s East Side in many ways, she said. Dr. Wright-Smith lived in a segregated neighborhood before moving to Rosegate and said the stories she heard from those in her book felt familiar to what she experienced in her childhood homes.

“During the great migration period, when African Americans were moving north to look for better jobs, my parents came from the Eastern Shore,” Dr. Wright-Smith said. “With the families that I interviewed in this book, I thought a lot of them were going to say they came from the Deep South. A few of them did, but many of them migrated from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, too.”

In her doctoral studies, she said she conducted in-depth research of Black churches on Wilmington’s East Side. Though that was 15 years ago, she believed there was another story to tell.

“Many themes started coming out of the interviews I was having with the residents,” Dr. Wright-Smith said. “But the most prominent one was that the East Side was always considered a very self-sustaining community, that even though they live in a segregated neighborhood, closed off from opportunities and resources, the residents really showed a determination to protect one another no matter what.”

Dr. Wright-Smith also championed her publisher, Arcadia Publishing, because part of what it does is celebrate the history of neighborhoods, towns and cities across the nation.

The company shared her vision for the book, which is largely made up of images. Photographs, documents and letters fill all 127 pages, which are split into six chapters: “Family Life of Early Settlers,” “Black-Owned Businesses and Entrepreneurs,” “Historic Churches and Religious Customs,” “Neighborhood Schools and Educators,” “Arts, Culture and Entertainment” and “Community Institutions and Urban Renewal.”

“I give courtesy to all of the families that I sat down with to allow me to come into their homes and to allow me to sit down with them and look at their photo albums and find photos and places they didn’t realize they had been for a while,” Dr. Wright-Smith said. “What I really feel that’s special about this book is that many photos would not have been revealed. They’re special stories that may not have been told.”

She notes the uniqueness of the East Side because it had such a strong foundation economically.

“If you go through Chapter 2, you’ll see countless numbers of medical doctors and lawyers and teachers,” Dr. Wright-Smith said. “There were so many professionals and political leaders on the East Side, and that was unlike other communities, probably in the entire region, including the city of Wilmington. So that one community had the political strength to help fight a lot of the laws that were unjust and discriminatory. Strategically, many of the professionals … also wore other hats. They became political leaders and civic leaders because they knew they had to be.”

She added that every story in the book is memorable for her, but a few stand out.

Her husband’s father, Coleman E. Smith, is featured in the first chapter, which she said was a personal and special addition to her. He attended Howard High School and went on to work at General Motors, which provided manufacturing jobs for many Black working-class families at the time.

Dr. Wright-Smith also wanted to lift up the voices of older residents. Edward Loper Jr., born in 1934, is a self-taught artist renowned for his use of color and as a master of oil paintings. The book shows a photo of Mr. Loper with his mom and brother in the early 1940s and a sketch that he drew, titled “Birdseye,” portraying the 11th Street Bridge area in the 1960s.

In Chapter 2, Dr. Wright-Smith points out a few figures who were “well ahead of their time.” One is John O. Hopkins Sr., one of Delaware’s first Black registered pharmacists and a very astute businessman, who owned the East Side’s Hopkins Theater — the only Black-owned movie theater in Wilmington at the time. This book is the first place the Hopkins Theater’s ownership certificate has been publicized.

Irma Lawson was another influential figure, born in 1897. She owned and operated the Lawson Hotel, which was in the “Green Book,” a sort of travel guide for African Americans during segregation that provided safe public spaces to dine, socialize or lodge.

“Her family allowed me to publish her sign-in book from the hotel,” Dr. Wright-Smith said. “And she was very close friends with (musician) Lionel Hampton. So I just get the warm fuzzies when I look at that because, you know, he actually signed her book, and the family allowed me to publish that.

“I started the book where I ended it,” Dr. Wright-Smith said. “Everything was intentional. At the beginning, there’s the voice of an elder that says how the community took care of and protected one another, but then at the end, there’s the voice of the community again because during the segregation period, the East Side experienced urban renewal, like many Black communities across the nation.”

On the final page, a letter from the Wilmington Housing Authority is spotlighted, informing officials at St. Michael’s Day Nursery for Colored Children about WHA’s position to negotiate acquisition of property owned by the nursery for an urban-renewal project. The book says, “While the civic urban renewal project was designed to eliminate slum clearance and approve residential and commercial properties, some long-time residents of the East Side claimed that the planned improvements also resulted in a breakdown of the existing social and economic fabric of their community.”

“It shows how the community began to change, and that is a larger American story,” Dr. Wright-Smith said. “There’s many Black communities across the nation and major metropolitan areas that have that similar outcome and the similar challenge today when we think about how we address some of the conditions and issues in predominantly vulnerable communities.”

Dr. Wright-Smith describes her work as a “coffee-table book” that she hopes ends up in the homes of every family represented and those of many Wilmington residents because the book is “key to the history of the city.”

“It is limitless, in my opinion, in terms of who could benefit from the inspiration that I’ve tried to share. I tried to ensure that is illustrated here,” she said. “But also, so Black communities can see that part of history needs to be told, and sometimes, it’s not always told.”

Dr. Wright-Smith’s book is available for purchase at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target and Arcadia Publishing.