Times of scarcity ended with the Allied victory in Europe in 1945. After World War II, returning African American GIs and African American college students would open a new chapter in the cultural and political history of the United States. African American spaces such as churches, restaurants, and bars and grills provided sanctuary from the brutalities and offenses suffered under jim crow.
EATING JIM CROW
Restaurants, Barbecue Stands, and Bars and Grills During Segregation
Black folk bought and thoroughly enjoyed soul food long before restaurant owners and cookbook writers started using the term. Before the emergence of the civil rights and black power movements, African American cooks working at segregated restaurants, barbecue stands, bars and grills, and nightclubs helped establish consumer demand for what became known as soul food in the late 1960s. Jim crow policies ensured that black restaurants remained separate black spaces. For working-class blacks, these eateries enabled them to relax and recover from the stress of racial politics in North America.1
Many of the eateries owed their success to the jim crow laws and customs that restricted the public dining options of African Americans beginning in the late nineteenth century.2 A number of the folks interviewed recalled the challenges of finding good food and service in restaurants before the 1954 landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education that ended the principle of “separate but equal” and effectively began the slow death of jim crow segregation laws. Before 1954, African American parents raised their children to cope with jim crow restrictions. Eugene Watts, from Waynesboro, Virginia, remembers: “You didn’t just walk into a white establishment,” you stood in front until somebody came out and typically said, “Boy, are you lost?” It was then appropriate to stand, looking down at the ground, and politely reply, “No sir, I would like to get something to eat.” African American elders made sure that before black youths went downtown, they clearly understood the particularities, dictates, and customs of buying food at a white-owned restaurant. Says Watts, African American youths knew better than to “go through the door and try and get you something to eat” at a white-owned restaurant without first obtaining permission from an employee.3
FIGURE 6.1 African American sitting on bench at side of barbecue stand made of galvanized metal, 1939, Corpus Christi, Tex. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF33-012032-M2.
BLACK COOKS, CUSTOMERS, AND SEGREGATION
An African American named Daroca Lane was a cook at a segregated lunch counter in the bus depot in the city of Alba, Alabama. Her nephew, Joseph Johnson, told me that as a child he worked there with his aunt Daroca. Black and white customers could order a piping-hot breakfast of sausage, eggs, and grits. At lunch and dinner Aunt Daroca served up mashed potatoes, peas, and chicken and dumplings, with sweet potato pie for dessert. It is ironic that most of the white owners of segregated eateries in the South filled their kitchens with African American cooks but often refused to sell food made by blacks to black customers.4
When black customers were permitted to eat in an establishment, jim crow segregation laws required that blacks sit apart from white customers. In her memoir, singer Diana Ross, who grew up in Detroit, remembers a trip she made with her siblings to visit relatives in Bessemer, Alabama, in the 1950s. “I dimly recall seeing signs on water fountains, in waiting rooms, and at movie theatres: WHITE, COLORED.” She goes on to say, “There were so many indignities black people endured; everything was separate and unequal.”5 At the Alba bus depot, a sign posted at the lunch counter designated “colored” and “white” ordering and sitting sections. “You would order your food from the colored side, but you didn’t come together,” remembers Joseph Johnson. At other restaurants, white owners made black customers buy at a “colored” window at the rear of the building.6
Selling and purchasing food at the “colored” window of a segregated restaurant could be a degrading and even dangerous experience, says Eugene Watts; you never knew when some volatile white person behind the counter was going to “go off.” For the slightest reason, white owners and managers might fly into a rage at the sight of an African American restaurant employee attending to an African American customer. They would sometimes claim the employee was taking too long, but mostly they would jump at any opportunity to unleash racist comments that articulated their contempt for both the employee and the customer. Managers often pushed their employees to dispense hasty service to African American customers, and African American employees sometimes rushed black customers so that they would get their orders in without incident.7
African Americans eating outside their communities remained on their best behavior, having been taught never to show any emotion no matter what kind of bad treatment they received from a white-owned restaurant. But, despite the outward appearance of deference, African Americans regularly resisted jim crow.8 Interviews with southerners indicate that African American customers and restaurant employees did not simply capitulate to conditions in the South but employed what one scholar calls “infrapolitics.”9 In the case of segregated restaurants, infrapolitics included such everyday forms of resistance as theft, passing, and employing what one historian calls the “cult of Sambohood”: using grins, shuffles, and “yas-sums” to get what one needed without violence. Infrapolitics describes the “daily confrontations, evasive actions, and stifled thoughts that often inform organized political movements.”10 For example, blacks working the “colored” window at white-owned restaurants regularly gave away food or discounted the food sold to blacks. Another form of resistance was to travel with someone light enough in complexion to pass as white and have that person get takeout orders from restaurants that would not serve black customers.11 But the most common strategy for coping with the humilities suffered under jim crow was to buy food only from black-owned establishments, especially when traveling. Through word of mouth, blacks traveling across the country drafted mental road maps indicating where black communities and restaurants existed.12
For example, Joan B. Lewis recalls her first road trip in the summer of 1953 to Durham, North Carolina, to attend North Carolina Central University (NCCU), an HBCU not far from Duke University. She and her family drove from New York to North Carolina on U.S. Interstate 301. Lewis recalls that the road was very scenic, and you had to drive through a lot of little towns. But 1953 “was really a segregated time,” and when you hit the jim crow state of Maryland, “you could not go to the bathroom!” If you did not know anyone in a jim crow region, “you could get gas at the gas station, but you couldn’t go to get anything to eat,” says Lewis.13 If you drove into the District of Columbia, which was very racist, there were a number of African American sections of the city where you could eat. In the northwestern part of the city, the home of Howard University, an HBCU, two historic restaurants could be found not far from campus: the Florida Avenue Grill and Ben’s Chili Bowl located on P Street. Both were popular African American–owned places where Howard students went for hassle-free down-home food. If you did not stop in the District, you kept driving until you reached the city of Richmond.14
In Richmond,15 two popular eateries for African Americans were the Greasy Spoon and Johnnie B’s. Located just a couple blocks from Virginia Union, an HBCU, Johnnie B’s made the best bologna burgers, served with “fried onions, lettuce, and tomato, and if you want to, throw a little piece of cheese on there too, that’s good right,” recalls Yemaja Jubilee, who attended Virginia Union in the 1960s. “And the buns were big! They weren’t like the buns now! I get excited talking about it,” she says. They also sold milk shakes, “all different kinds of milk shakes.” It was the kind of place where there were often lines going out the door to order food, “and it was black owned.”16
Even those traveling far afield from such large cities as Richmond would have found African American neighborhoods and eateries like the Greasy Spoon and Johnnie B’s. Jim crow ensured that African Americans almost “always lived across the railroad tracks” or in se
ctions of a municipality called the lowlands, hollows, or bottoms, arguably short for the least desirable real estate in an area. One historian found that New Deal–era surveys tended to locate African American neighborhoods in areas where it flooded. As he put it, when it “rained, the water found its way to the places where black people lived.”17
Most African American communities had at least one eatery where one could get down-home cooking. One of the best examples of these 1950s eateries were the Cleveland, Ohio,18 barbecue stands of Eugene “Hot Sauce” Williams, which were even featured in an article in Ebony magazine. In 1920 Williams, a childhood friend of Louis Armstrong and a onetime fish peddler in Louisiana, migrated from New Orleans to Chicago, where he became a cooper. Four years later he migrated to Cleveland in search of business opportunity. With no previous professional experience, he started a barbecue rib business after taking out a loan for fifty-eight dollars from “Cleveland’s first barbecue czar,” Henry “the Black King” Burkett. Williams returned to his native New Orleans around 1934, spending days “just drifting among cooks, gathering bits of information here and there on barbecue. One of the city’s oldest chefs took an interest in him and let him in on his personal method of preparing tasty ribs.” Returning to Cleveland with the culinary secret of making excellent ribs, Williams established two thriving rib stands that employed a total of twenty-five people.19
FIGURE 6.2 Barbecue stand, Fort Benning, Columbus, Ga., December 1940. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF34-056482-D.
By 1950 he was grossing about $100,000 a year in sales as customers packed the two stands he operated “almost any hour during the six nights” per week they were open. He offered no delivery service, “but his spots often fill large orders from private parties and clubs,” said the article in Ebony. Even Louis Armstrong was said to have phoned in an order for “300 large boxes of the flavory ribs.” Most credited the success of his Cleveland barbecue stands to the secret way Williams flavored his ribs with “a dry spice powder and taste-tantalizing hot sauce.” Only he knew the formula for the powder, which he personally sprinkled on all his precooked meats. According to Williams, it was not just the ingredients he used: “It’s the cooking that counts. Good cooking comes from proper timing and the right amount of heat.” His further instructions were to cook the ribs slowly over a low-burning charcoal flame, taking care to cook them thoroughly, but not long enough to dry them out.20
Joseph Johnson, a native of Alabama who operated a barbecue stand, argues that, in most restaurants operated by southerners, “you didn’t have a lot of variety on the menu.” Specialized dishes of fried fish, barbecued or stewed meat and rice, or smothered fried chicken (place fried chicken in a frying pan, add 2 cups hot water, let simmer for 30 minutes) and rice were some of the only dishes a lot of small, southern-operated restaurants offered.21 The African American–owned Dew Drop Inn in Waynesboro, Virginia, for example, ran a Friday special on fried fish, grits, and collards, served all day long. In Greensboro, North Carolina, Barry’s Grill was one of the most popular places in the city’s African American community.22 Betty Johnson of Attalla, Alabama, briefly attended North Carolina A & T, an HBCU in Greensboro, in the 1950s. Before the 1960 student sit-in movement at the Woolworth’s and S. H. Kress store lunch counters, fear of white hostility dissuaded her and her classmates from ever trying to enter white restaurants in downtown Greensboro. Instead, they enjoyed the fried chicken and pork chops available at black-owned Barry’s Grill.23 In the city of Durham, African Americans lived in the Pettigrew community, where NCCU was located. Restaurants that African Americans patronized in the community were the Our Campus Grill, located on the NCCU campus, and the Off Campus Grill, in the heart of the larger community. Both restaurants specialized in burgers and barbecue. Further south in the city of Athens, Georgia, there was another great restaurant for barbecue.24
African Americans Robert and Gladys Walker (who went by the names Bill and Geraldine) started a barbecue stand that specialized in hot pork sandwiches. Bill Walker first started accumulating capital in Athens working for “white folks” at the age of ten. He took jobs “rolling an afflicted white man around in his wheel chair” for a dollar a week and then worked as a “houseboy for the white folks my mother worked for,” at $2.50 a week. After that he took a job doubling as butler and chauffeur for friends of his mother’s “white folks,” where he earned $7 per week. When his employers fell on hard times, he left Athens for Atlanta, where he worked briefly at a barbecue stand, a fraternity house, and sundry other places for two years. “I was saving my money all that time to set up a barbecue stand of my own some day,” he told WPA writer Sadie B. Hornsby.25
After Bill married Geraldine, the couple decided to open up a barbecue stand that would sell sandwiches, hash, Brunswick stew, and other dishes Bill had learned how to make when he worked at the barbecue stand in Atlanta.26 No one is sure of the origins of Brunswick stew. Natives of Brunswick, Georgia, claim it came from there. Similarly, natives of Brunswick County, Virginia, say it was created in their region in the 1820s. Some suspect it is derived from Native American cookery, because the earliest recipes call for squirrel meat to make the stock of the stew, which is typical of Native cookery. Brunswick stew is “almost as necessary to a barbecue dinner as the barbecue itself,” said one unidentified Alabama WPA writer: “Those parts of the meat unsuited to barbecuing form the stock of the almost-inevitable Brunswick stew. Added to the meat, in boiling pots, are canned tomatoes, and corn, potatoes, onions, bell pepper, black pepper, Worcestershire sauce, catsup, vinegar, lemon juice, butter and cayenne pepper.”27
In Athens, the Walkers recalled digging their “first barbecue pit in our own backyard, and that good old meat was barbecued in the real Southern style.” Southern-style barbecue required as much as fifteen to twenty hours of slow cooking over hickory or some other hardwood embers. Precooking preparation could take almost half that time. Both precooking and barbecuing required skill, but precooking, seasoning, and mixing the barbecue basting sauce drew on techniques passed down from West African ancestors, such as using lemon juice and hot peppers as essential ingredients. As in Africa, sauce recipes differed across regions of the South. “We done so much business that first summer,” recalled Bill Walker, “that we decided to keep our stand going through the winter with home barbecued meat. We already had it screened but when winter come we boarded our pit up.” In two years, the business literally grew out of a hole in the ground that was their barbecue pit into a corner restaurant. “When we sure opened up for business, I had 500 circulars distributed in a radius of 10 blocks around here, and then we went to work, day and night, to build up our trade.”28
Flyers and word of mouth had the couple doing a brisk business in ten-cent barbecue sandwiches. In addition to barbecue, the Walkers sold corn bread, fish, cooked liver, bowls of hash and Brunswick stew, bottled beer, soft drinks, and candy. Geraldine Walker, originally from Bogart, Georgia, was raised on a farm not far from Athens. When she was old enough, she started doing farm work, which she never liked. Soon thereafter she went to work for a white lady for sixty cents a week, “helping with her work, such as toting water to the house, bringing in stovewood, and tending the food after she put it on the stove, to keep it from burning; She learnt me to make my first corn bread.”29
Before she met Bill, she was married to her first husband and worked as a cook for five years. After the death of her first husband and her subsequent marriage to Bill, she kept on working as a cook for whites. “The reason I stopped working out was to help Bill in our barbecue stand,” she recalled. They had to hire three delivery boys to serve customers who preferred their barbecue delivered. “Some of the nicest white people in this town send us their calls for lunches to be sent out to their offices and homes,” declared Geraldine, “and to tell the truth the white folk buy more of our barbecue than the Negroes does.” She added, “I’ve had at least a d
ozen calls for liver at the lunch counter, since I sold the last piece of it I had cooked up. These white folks around here sure do eat up liver fast as I can keep it cooked for ’em.”30
Not far from Athens, there were a number of good black-owned restaurants in the city of Atlanta. This was especially true in southwest Atlanta.31 One of the city’s African American communities was an educational consortium called the Atlanta University Center (AUC), located in southwest Atlanta. AUC schools, located across from the Georgia Dome, included the Interdenominational Theological Center, Atlanta University (now Clark-Atlanta University), Morris Brown College, Morehouse College, and Spelman College. In the neighborhood surrounding the AUC complex were notable black eateries like Pascal’s, as well as more humble holes-in-the-wall.32
Pascal’s was down on Hunter Street (later changed to Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.). During the civil rights movement, the restaurant served as a popular meeting place for black activists and politicians. Martin Luther King, Jr., Maynard Jackson, and Julian Bond, who all attended Morehouse, held strategy meetings over down-home cooking at Pascal’s. According to Marcellas C. D. Barksdale, who attended Morehouse in the early 1960s, Pascal’s was no dump. To the contrary, it was a white-tablecloth restaurant for middle- and upper-class African Americans in Atlanta, the “number-one so-called classy restaurant” for African American professionals. During segregation it remained the first choice for a Sunday meal for “Doctor and Mrs. so and so.” In addition, well-to-do Morehouse students would also take their “public girlfriends” to Pascal’s for Sunday dinner, says Barksdale. You could get full-course, great-tasting meals for two people for five dollars. In addition to formal dining, Pascal’s also had a lunch counter and grill for casual dining.33 Stanlie M. James, originally from Iowa, came to Atlanta in the late 1960s. She remembers eating grits and “sweet milk” for the first time in her life at Pascal’s during her campus visit with her family to Spelman. For AUC students who could afford it, Sunday night fried chicken dinners at Pascal’s were a tradition. But for those with less money there were neighborhood eateries, mom-and-pop corner places, that sold takeout.34
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