Baltimore is a city that celebrates its rich mix of history, art
and commerce, and invests in what many might call fairly mundane matters, much symbolic importance. Such is certainly the case with Baltimore's arabbers -- the mysteriously named horse-cart vendors whose trade once represented, simultaneously, the capillaries of the city's complex food distribution system, a generations-old system of informal apprenticeship for many young men in commerce and the streets, and the symbolic reach of a small-town past into Baltimore's big-city present.

There is nothing about the arabbers that is unique to Baltimore, except the name. And, that name summons many of the issues about who they are and what they do that continues to spark debate about their prospects. While we have little information about whether the term "arabber" was used to describe individuals similarly employed in other parts of the United States, Baltimore's horse-cart vendors have been referred to as "arabs," "ay-rabs" and "Arabbers" for most of this century. In Baltimore, "arabbers" are people who "arab," which means to sell foodstuffs from horse-drawn wagons. (While there is disagreement about whether people who sell foodstuffs from the trunk of a parked car or the bed of a pickup truck are arabbers, there is clearly a natural continuity between the sale of produce or seafood from a slow-moving horse-drawn wagon and from a motorized vehicle parked at a city street corner.)

Until WWII, arabbers had been mostly white. WWII's defense industry drew in most of the white (and some black) arabbers. After the war, very few white arabbers returned to this tradition. As a result, ninety percent of the arabbers have been black since WWII, which is why most people today have mistakenly thought that arabbing has solely been an African-American tradition.

Roland L. Freeman, the exhibit's curator, is a fourth-generation arabber. The exhibit is the culmination of 20 years of his research and documentation. It consists of approximately 140 black and white photographs of various sizes, plus introduction and text. Individual prints from The Arabbers of Baltimore, as well as the Exhibit Poster are available in the Online Catalog.

An accompanying book, similarly titled, was published in conjunction with the exhibit though it is now out of print.