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 sections 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 dozen 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

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 remember 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

Fields’ did a brisk business, especially on Fridays and Saturdays, when it offered live jazz. The place also had booming business on Sunday afternoons, when African American couples in the 1950s and 1960s traditionally went out for lunch or dinner and a movie. Greenburg resident and photographer Gordon Parks was a regular at Fields’ on Sundays. In addition to chicken and ribs, Fields’ served fried shrimp, collard greens, sweet potato pie, and delicious rolls. Customers would rave about the rolls, though Boswell says, “I guess I can say this now, they were store-bought rolls.” And the sweet potato pies, “frozen, store bought,” he confesses. “Nobody knew [and] nobody” ever suspected that some of the down-home food was not made in-house. It was the Fields’ family secret. The other bars and grills in the area, Farmer’s and Tark’s, had smaller food menus, and people went to them principally for the liquor. According to Boswell, “Fields’ was the place in the area” for southern food and live jazz.⁶⁵

Similar venues for food and live jazz existed in the African American sections of the Westchester towns along the Hudson River. There was Club Six, owned by southern migrant Martin Cotton and five other African American business partners (hence the name). This African American honky-tonk, located under a bridge just up the road from the Tarrytown train depot, provided live hot jazz played by local virtuosos. Bass player Benny Molten, drummer June Bug Lindsay, and saxophonist Carmen John Leggio, all from North Tarrytown, along with piano player and Yonkers native Ketter Betts, began their careers playing local venues like Club Six before going on to join big-time bands with jazz legends Maynard Ferguson, Gene Krupa, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Buddy Rich, and others. In addition to great music, Club Six had “a lot of soul food and really good eating” says Alice Conqueran. Like the Greasy Spoon in Atlanta and the one in Richmond, Club Six was a place where you could get fried chicken and just about anything else on a sandwich.⁶⁶

Alice Conqueran remembers that De Carlo’s was up the street from Club Six in the middle of Cortland Street’s African American neighborhood. De Carlo’s, she says, “used to be a poolroom and then became a bar.” North Tarrytown native Mary Tweedy used to be the cook at De Carlo’s, where you could order fresh fried porgies and other items.⁶⁷ According to Margaret Opie, before the end of de facto segregation in Westchester, “black bars had to have food” because white restaurants did not serve African American customers or, if they did, they served them with such haste and hostility that you did not want to go back. Thus African American bar owners usually looked for someone whose reputation as a cook could draw customers, someone who could really “throw down,” says Opie. “Usually it was a separate person that had that concession in the bar.” In short, these concessions of really good southern food were important “appendices to these places.”⁶⁸

If you took the train from Tarrytown ten miles north along the Hudson, you would arrive in the village of Ossining, the home of Sing Sing Prison. At one time, the village of Ossining was officially called Sing Sing, named after the Sing Sing Indians who inhabited the small hamlet just thirty-five miles north of New York City. African Americans would frequent a neighborhood bar and grill in Ossining called Bar Harbor, located on Hunter Street just a couple of blocks from the railroad station. The prison was a stone’s throw south of Bar Harbor on Hunter Street. Two southern-born brothers, Raymond and Walter Cook, originally from Virginia, owned the establishment.⁶⁹ If you continued north on the train along the banks of the Hudson for another twenty minutes, you would eventually make your way to the city of Peekskill. Here, African Americans, especially from Ossining and the Tarrytowns, went to Green’s Bar and Grill to dance and dine with African American residents of Peekskill. Howard Green owned and operated the bar and grill. According to Joan Lewis, Green’s, located in downtown Peekskill, was nicer than Ossining’s Bar Harbor and Tarry-town’s Club Six and De Carlo’s. All these clubs had essentially the same type of southern food: fried chicken, potato salad, corn bread, greens, sweet potato pie, and layer cakes.⁷⁰

Mom-and-pop operations, bus stop lunch counters, and bars and grills represent the modern origins of the restaurants that started appearing with the phrase “soul food” in their signage and other marketing materials in the late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. African American cooks in what I call pre–civil rights, black power, and soul institutions established the definition of a good menu in restaurants that specialized in southern food. In the South, African American women reserved the labor-intensive process of making rolls and sweet potato pies for special occasions: Sundays, holidays, church events, weddings, and funerals. In commercial establishments throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, “southern fare” became synonymous with fried chicken or fish on a sandwich, chopped barbecue, rolls or biscuits, collard greens, sweet potato pies, and cakes. Thus special-occasion foods became the food that these honky-tonks and restaurants sold to African American consumers. It was food that was easy to market because it was relatively inexpensive, it tasted good, and it was attached to memories of special times spent with family and friends in tight-knit African American communities. It was also food that could be obtained without jim crow restrictions.

African American responses to de facto jim crow in New York were similar to those of blacks in the South. African Americans in New York kept mental ratings of the restaurants where they lived. White-owned restaurants were rated on their food, service, and civility toward black customers. The African American rating list also included all the black-owned restaurants where one could obtain down-home southern food and, with favor, southern hospitality. Thus African Americans visiting other communities, from New York to Atlanta, learned from each other the best places to eat before 1954, when lunch counters and restaurants in North America were desegregated.

 

FIGURE 6.4 “White” and “Colored,”: Durham, N.C., May 1940. Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USF33-020513-M2.

Joan Lewis, the Ossining native who went south to attend NCCU in Durham, provides interesting insights into the significance of the 1954 Supreme Court decision officially ending segregation in the United States. When she went to Durham in the summer of 1953 to start her freshmen year, city restaurants and the bus depot lunch counter were all segregated. “Now everything changed. I was down there in 1953; in 1954 when we came back after the summer, for the next year, all the signs were gone because they had to integrate in 1954.” The change in racial tolerance was drastic, says Lewis. In Durham, white restaurant owners changed their behavior toward African American customers, and “you could do what you wanted to do,” says Lewis. She recalls that during her first year, “we were sitting way up in the balcony, they put the black people up in the balcony at the theatre downtown.” The “next year,” however, “we came and we could sit anywhere we wanted to sit.” Similar changes happened in the restaurants. After 1954 “we could eat downtown then. They had some little shops. We would go down there and eat” without encountering hostility or indifference from restaurant employees. In short, some white owners quickly recognized there was more economic opportunity in serving African American customers than in snubbing them.⁷¹

But on Route 31 in Maryland, it was still hard for African Americans to find hospitable places to eat. Lewis recalls that, in her junior year, she began to carpool back and forth between Westchester and Durham with two male students from Peekskill who had cars. In 1955 “we got so we could stop in some parts of Maryland, [but] not too much.” But by the time Lewis graduated from NCCU in 1957, she says, “we could ride up and down and you could do what you wanted to do.”⁷² In other parts of the country, jim crow died at a much slower pace. Speaking of her experience in the South, Motown superstar Diana Ross writes, “Segregation did not stop in the 1950s but continued well into the sixties and, in some areas, even the seventies.”⁷³ In urban centers on the East and West Coasts, the black spaces that were a consequence of jim crow segregation helped assimilate black immigrants from various regions of the South and the rest of the Americas into an urban African American identity. In many instances, these social spaces helped push many into a veritable African American melting pot of native blacks and blacks from the South and the Caribbean. And so it was that African Americans developed the worldview they called soul. Soul became very popular, and many blacks used it to counteract the painful realities of racism on both coasts.