In most African American neighborhoods there was some type of “café, or cafeteria, or restaurant as you may call it,” says Atlanta native and Morehouse graduate Alton Hornsby, Jr. “In my neighborhood [the Mechanicsville-Pittsburgh section] in Southwest Atlanta, I know there were at least three within a few blocks from my home. Indeed, my parents owned and operated a small place for several years which was called the Greasy Spoon.” Hornsby remembers there was a bar that had about four stools and a “jar of pig’s feet and other little sundry items.” Most customers bought takeout “because we only sold sort of carry out items like fried fish sandwiches, chicken sandwiches, and barbecue sandwiches.”35
In the 1950s and 1960s, AUC students “were trying to go some place and get good food off campus. Because the food was just institutional,” says James. It was not like today where college cafeterias are operated like a food court with salad bars, pasta bars, and lots of options. When she was a student at Spelman, James goes on to say, “if they were having liver and onions, then that’s what they were having.”36 Students at other HBCUs had similar complaints about the food in the college cafeterias. Before he moved to Atlanta and became one of Reverend King’s deputies in the civil rights movement, Ralph David Abernathy led a student strike to protest food inequalities between faculty and students in the cafeteria of Alabama State College.37
Abernathy enrolled in Alabama State in the late 1940s on the GI Bill, after receiving an honorable discharge from the army. Reflecting on the cafeteria food at Alabama State, he remembers the students eating for lunch “heaps of steaming pork and beans—and nothing more, not even a piece of bread to sop it up.” Dinner was not much different. He writes that the best dinner they ever had was Spam with unbuttered grits, while the faculty feasted on huge pieces of real country ham. “After several weeks of this fare, we were sick to death of it and were dreaming every night of fried chicken and biscuits.” Abernathy was elected student body president in his sophomore year. Right away he organized a complete student boycott of the cafeteria, and it did not take long for the school’s administration to act: the next time the cafeteria opened at Alabama State, students “saw huge platters of fried chicken waiting at the counter.”38
FIGURE 6.3 “Hot Fish”: Bryant’s Place, Memphis, Tenn., June 1937. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF34-017593-E.
At Virginia State and Virginia Union, faculty and students ate the same class of food, but that didn’t mean there were no complaints. At Virginia State, students ate what they called “wonder meat” because “we wondered what it was,” says Lamenta Diane Watkins Crouch, a 1970 Virginia state graduate.39 Her older sister, Francis Ann Watkins Neely, graduated from Virginia Union in 1967. “I really did not like the lamb chops” that they served in the cafeteria. “My husband went to Howard University and he told me that the meat that they served in the student cafeteria there he believed [was poor-quality cuts that] came from the federal government.” In general “we southerners just did not like the lunch and dinner menus in the college cafeteria,” says Neely.40 The food at Virginia State, according to her younger sister, “was not seasoned the same as home,” and there were a lot of “starchy foods including potatoes served with just about every meal and lots of pasta.”41 “My mother was a really good cook and that’s what I grew up on,” says Neely. “We southern students were always receiving care packages from home filled with good food. So we always knew somebody on campus who had just received a care packages so we would go and eat that instead of the cafeteria food.” The northern students, she said, who had fewer options, seemed to say very little about the cafeteria food but ate at the Union a lot more often than the southerners did.42
College students, white or black, gripe now and then about the quality of cafeteria fare. Yet the tendency may have been greater among southern students raised on elaborately seasoned traditional downhome food, food that was different than the cuisine that black students with parents native or acculturated to the north grew up on. The chief complaint of HBCU students was the bland taste of the food and repetitive menu. As Watkins Crouch recalled, “If there was chicken and vegetables served one day, we knew there was going to be chicken vegetable soup the next day.”43 Most scholars accept that HBCUs received far less government funding than did white institutions. As a result, HBCU administrators had to use leftovers in soups and stews to reduce their expenditures. The bland nature of mass-produced institutional food, inadequate funding, and poor-quality meats made it difficult for cafeteria meals at HBCUs in the south to compete with traditional southern cooking.
In the South, disdain for institutional food, even black institutional food, and the hostility blacks encountered in white spaces helped maintain culinary traditions in the African American community. Similar factors ensured the proliferation of black culinary traditions in the North. There, African Americans “accepted a certain way of life, but we did not think of it as segregation,” Diana Ross writes of Detroit in the 1940s and 1950s. She grew up in an all-black urban neighborhood and accepted segregation until the defiance of people like Rosa Parks and the forging of the civil rights movement.44 In suburban Westchester County, African Americans grew up in quasi-segregated housing arrangements, typically living next to largely poor Italian, and some Latin American immigrants. In both urban Harlem and suburban communities in Westchester, racist whites made it very clear whom they wanted to serve in their dinner clubs and restaurants.
HARLEM IN THE 1950S
Before 1945 restaurant chains in New York City refused to serve African Americans and restricted their employment options, refusing to let them serve behind luncheonette counters. Furthermore, until the passage of antidiscrimination laws after World War II, African Americans in New York restaurants endured “inferior service, especially in terms of seat location [if they were seated at all], personal treatment, and length of wait,” writes one historian.45 This was not the case in Harlem, which was a hotbed for communist and other radicals who protested against second-class treatment anywhere in that Upper West Side African American community. Harlem, with its amazing jazz clubs and restaurants, remained a great place to socialize in the 1940s and 1950s. There was Tillie’s Chicken Shack, Well’s (for chicken and waffles), the Red Rooster, Jock’s Place, and the Bon Goo Barbecue.
The Bon Goo Barbecue opened in 1938 and became a very popular Harlem eatery. It was located at 717 St. Nicholas Avenue, north of 145th Street in the heart of Harlem’s bustling nightclub district. An African American man named Lamar operated the restaurant, whose clientele included “most of Harlem’s celebrities and a mixed group from the middle working classes, including both white and black.” At the Bon Goo Barbecue one could order golden brown spare ribs for thirty cents and chicken or roast lamb for thirty-five cents, all served with spaghetti, coleslaw, and bread and butter. The menu also included “pig’s feet and ham for those who desired them.” Take-out orders, called the “Housewives’ Special,” could be purchased in larger portions: for example, whole chickens could be purchased for $1.70. The twenty-four-hour restaurant did its best business at night, after clubs like the Savoy and Renaissance Ballrooms had closed.46
Saxophonist Carmen Leggio recalls hanging out at the Metropolis and the Cooper Rail in addition to the Savoy and Renaissance ballrooms in New York. The Metropolis was located just a couple of blocks from Bird-land, a jazz club in Harlem named after jazz giant Charlie “Bird” Parker.47 The Metropolis was one of the late-night stops, a “winding-down place for the African American swing musicians,” says Leggio, who was born in 1927. It was located on Seventh Avenue, and across the street was a southern food restaurant called the Cooper Rail. In the 1950s the police left the club and the restaurant alone despite the drug pushing and using that went on there. Artists like Ben Webster, Henry Red Allen, Charlie Schafer, and Ornette Coleman hung out at the restaurant all night long, talking jive and eating pigs’ feet, black-eyed peas and rice
, collard greens, and fried chicken.48
Not far from the Cooper Rail, on 120th Street and Seventh, or Lenox, Avenue, was a place called Creole Pete’s. It served as a popular restaurant for those living in boardinghouses without kitchen facilities. Rudy Bradshaw recalls, “It was very difficult for a lot of brothers and sisters in Harlem. . . to get a room with a kitchenette; if you did not have a room with a kitchenette and just had a hall room, that meant that the bulk of the brothers who were bachelors in those days had to find a certain place where they could eat their dinner, and Creole Pete’s was one of those places.” It was not a “top-of-the-line Harlem restaurant,” but you could get a good yet inexpensive home-cooked meal with friendly service. Pete, the restaurant’s owner, migrated to New York from New Orleans.49
Tillie’s Chicken Shack also provided inexpensive meals with dignity for a diverse clientele. Red-and-white-checked cloths covered plain tables, and old hit songs and pictures of the artists that sang them covered the walls. The Chicken Shack had a piano “used constantly by the musically inclined,” and a kitchen equipped with old-fashioned iron pots. Tillie’s multiethnic patrons, many of them socialites, entertainers, politicians, and other celebrities, consumed “400 chickens and 200 pounds of fat” per week from Arthur Addison’s kosher market.50 Tillie purchased her other groceries from the A&P next door to her business.vLocated at 237 Lenox Avenue, just above 121st Street, the Chicken Shack became famous for its fried chicken dinners served with yams, hot biscuits, and coffee, all for a dollar. “It is difficult to estimate the number of biscuits consumed by a single patron,” writes WPA author Sarah Chavez, “but the piled-up plate returns to the kitchen empty.” In addition to fried chicken, the menu also included black eyed peas “cooked southern style, boiled with hogs head or pig tails.”51
In hash houses in Manhattan’s Bowery neighborhood and from street vendors throughout the city, African American customers could also expect good-tasting inexpensive food unaccompanied by the hassle of jim crow racism. In addition to goulashes, stews, and ragouts, customers also feasted on dishes familiar to African American southerners, such as pigs’ knuckles and snouts, beef tongue, and liver. WPA writers Irving Ripps and Macdougall observed firsthand that no color line existed in hash houses. In one restaurant, Ripps reported, eight thousand people a day ate “tremendous quantities of simple” food, twenty-four hours a day. For as little as between two and four cents you could have fishcakes, spaghetti, clam chowder, hamburgers, macaroni and cheese, and french fries. These foods, especially the greasy and unhealthy french-fried potatoes, were modern introductions to African American cuisine from European immigrants. Over time, the easy-to-make deep-fried potatoes would, in many instances, replace the traditional southern and labor-intensive home fries, which typically called for chopping and dicing red or white potatoes, adding onions, peppers, garlic, and seasoning, and then slow-cooking them in a frying pan for nearly an hour. At Bowery hash houses, dessert, usually “incredible quantities of rice pudding or large cuts of pie,” was likewise priced below five cents. The inexpensive menu attracted a diverse crowd of poor folk, but restaurant owners enforced no color line.52
In the 1940s and 1950s African Americans and Puerto Ricans where just starting to migrate from other parts of New York City, slowly gaining footholds in once predominately Irish, Italian, German, and Jewish neighborhoods in the South Bronx. “By 1950, there were almost 160,000 African Americans and Puerto Ricans in the borough, 91 percent of then in the South Bronx, concentrated around Prospect and Westchester avenues where their compatriots had settled years earlier. Later arrivals joined them as migration from the rural South and Puerto Rico continued,” writes historian Evelyn Gonzalez.53
Kwame Braithwaite, an activist, photographer, and expert on the history of jazz in New York City was born in Brooklyn. His family, migrants from Barbados, lived in Brooklyn for about a year before moving to Harlem and then, when he was five years old, in 1943, to Kelly Street between Longwood Avenue and 156th Street in the Bronx. “It was a very mixed block,” says Braithwaite, with people from Caribbean and the South. He remembers his Barbadian mother “used to make the best coconut bread ever and [she] . . . used to make it in two forms. . . either like in a bun or in the pan. She used to sell them. Everybody used to come around here. . . . People used to come by and place [an] order.” His mother was also renowned for cooking cucu, an okra dish from the Caribbean made with cornmeal and okra and served with boiled salt fish. She also made pigs feet with a sauce that was too unfamiliar to the New York–acculturated Barbadian American Braithwaite; he admits, “I didn’t eat [them].”54 African American Frank Belton’s family moved to the Bronx in 1948 from South Jamaica, Queens, when he was nine years old. In Queens, the family had lived in a mostly African American community. Much to his surprise, they moved to a largely Puerto Rican neighborhood on Chisholm Street, in the South Bronx. “I went to the grocery store one day and the guys were up there talking. I didn’t understand a word they were saying [laughter].” When he started school, he also noticed that a fair number of his classmates were Puerto Rican and thus came to the conclusion that “it was basically a Puerto Rican population in the South Bronx.” On Chisholm Street, there “was a kind of mixed population” of largely African Americans and Puerto Ricans, with Italians, “a couple of Irish” and one Jewish family that remained in the neighborhood until about 1952. “They were the last Jewish family to move off Chisholm Street. But the Italians, they stayed, even up until the time I was in college, there were still three Italian families still living on the block.” He says, “the Italians did not move, they held their ground.”55
Nathan “Bubba” Dukes, a Bronx basketball legend, recalls trips to Johnson’s Barbecue as a child for some down-home southern take-out. Duke’s family had moved from Columbia, South Carolina, to the South Bronx’s Prospect/Tinton Avenue area in the 1950s. His father was a superintendent of a tenement house not far from Johnson’s; the owner of the restaurant was also a South Carolinian migrant. Bubba Dukes loved living in the tenement housing because “every Friday, especially during the summer times, what would happen was, we would go around the corner on Tinton Avenue, [and] 161st Street. . . and there was Mr. Johnson’s rib, chicken, and potato salad place. And the lines would be backed up”56 I argue that eateries like Johnson’s Barbecue and similar venues selling Caribbean cuisine provided spaces that helped forge cordial relations and cultural exchanges among different ethnic groups and nationalities in the multiethnic neighborhoods of Harlem and the Bronx. As Paul Gilroy as shown, language proficiency, class, traditions, and housing patterns determined the amount of relationship building and cultural exchange that occurred in leisure and work spaces.57 More segregated sources of down-home food developed further north, as southerners and Caribbean immigrants settled in Westchester County.
WESTCHESTER COUNTY
Interviews with Westchester County residents make it clear that jim crow customs prevailed in most parts of metropolitan New York.58 Some white-owned restaurants in Westchester flatly refused service to African American customers, while others provided such hostile service that “word got around” not to go into specific bars and grills, says Alice N. Conqueran. Conqueran’s parents migrated to North Tarrytown from the French Caribbean Island of St. Lucia before the Depression. Alice was born in North Tarrytown in 1926 and spent her early childhood years living in the same cold-water flat as my father and his family.59
She remembers that when you walked into some restaurants in the county, “you got the message” that you were not welcome. Scharff’s Restaurant in White Plains was like that in the 1940s and 1950s, for instance; it just didn’t serve African Americans. In the South, jim crow racial hostility in restaurants was “open, but in the North it was subtle, but it was here,” says Conqueran. “You knew where you stood in the South, but in the North, you weren’t sure.” The very popular Wonderful Bar in Tarry-town was another example. This white-owned bar and grill served American cuisine. “I can re
member when blacks were not served in the Wonderful Bar,” says Conqueran, “this is going back to the 1940s and 1950s.”60
As Conqueran says, “You have to remember, in those days we weren’t as welcome in restaurants.”61 As a result, many African Americans patronized businesses such as black-owned and -operated bars and grills. Born in 1935, Margaret Opie argues, “because of segregation, black people would go, [I] am talking about young people like us, you would go to these bars not so much for drinking, but to get good food.” Most of the African American bars and grills in the county also had live music on the weekends.62
In metropolitan White Plains, an area with a sizable African American community, there was Tark’s on Central Avenue in White Plains proper, Farmer’s on Tarrytown Road in Greenburg, and Fields’ Rotisserie, also on Tarrytown Road. All were African American–owned and -operated bars and grills. Fields’ was owned and operated by John Fields and his wife; it remained a family-owned business until it closed for good in the 1980s.63
“The bill of fare,” says New Rochelle native Christopher Boswell, “consisted of ribs. . . cooked on a rotisserie and given the barbecue treatment before you served them, and they also served fried chicken.” Boswell worked as a cook at Fields’ in the 1960s. In 1910 His father had migrated from Trinidad to New Rochelle, where he worked as a bank courier in the old Huguenot Trust Company. His mother was from Chicago but migrated in the 1920s to New Rochelle, where she worked as a housekeeper at the old Bloomingdale’s. Boswell remembers that people used to come to the window at Fields’ when it had a “fry-o-ladder” and watch him cook. He would simultaneously fry thirty or more pieces of chicken while bystanders stood in stark amazement, wondering how he knew which pieces were ready to remove from the oil. It was simple, says Boswell: cooked chicken floats on hot oil “when it’s done, the same is true with fish.”64
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