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By Root 526 0

African American community, as people from the Caribbean and Latin America mingled with those up from the South on the streets and in markets and restaurants. Returning veterans male and female had been seated at the restaurants and cafes of Europe and knew that it was time for them to sit down at the country’s tables and lunch counters as equals at home. They became the force behind the tidal wave of change that fueled the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s.

GETTING THE WORD OUT: LENA RICHARD AND FREDA DEKNIGHT

Food was becoming a science in the country during the period of the Great Migration. Francis Merritt Farmer published the Boston Cooking School Cookbook in 1896, standardizing measurements and transforming the way America cooked. Home economics became a growing field of endeavor. Historically black schools that had placed the emphasis on the agricultural and the technical, like Hampton University, Tuskegee University, and Bethune-Cookman University (founded in 1905 as the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls), offered curricula centered on the practical. Those in the food-related courses of study learned cooking and proper service—courses designed to train them for jobs as domestics and in service jobs on the railroads and in hotels and restaurants.

Between 1936 and the end of the 1940s, Tuskegee even published a journal devoted to African Americans in the food and hospitality trades titled Service. The cover of the first issue, published in August 1936, features a triptych of photographs of blacks working as waiters, porters, and cooks with an inset photograph of Booker T. Washington, the president of Tuskegee and the thinker who espoused a doctrine of teaching technical skills as a way of empowerment. Articles include “The Importance of Salads” and extol the “Virtues of Efficiency,” while sections titled “Table Talks,” “Cock of the Walk,” “Front!” and “All Aboard!” feature items of special interest to waiters, cooks, bellmen, and porters, respectively. Issues of Service detail the varied and wide-ranging universe that the world of African American food had become. They include recipes for banana doughnuts and Brazil nut sundaes and offer a glimpse of a larger world through articles on travel to Argentina and the Bahamas. But interspersed among the glowing mentions of progress and success are topical pieces like the one detailing the foods for the war effort grown by “Negro farmers” and a 1942 piece titled “The Klan Rides.” Service was focused at blacks in the hotel, restaurant, and cafeteria businesses, and the journal got the word out: Its circulation reached all of the South as well as the District of Columbia and beyond, to New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, where the Great Migration had taken African Americans.

The title of Tuskegee’s journal coupled with its wide circulation remind that, as they had in the past, large numbers of black men and women turned to food and food service as a way of paying the bills. The articles within equally remind that, outside the world of black institutions or work in the service industries (railroads, food-processing plants, hotel and waitstaff work), there were few job opportunities other than working in domestic service for white families. Increasingly, though, a growing number of black domestic scientists and home economists began to expand the horizons and get the word about African American cooking to the black public and the world at large. Two women who were pioneers in this were Lena Richard and Freda DeKnight.

Lena Richard of New Orleans, like so many others of her time, began work as a domestic. Born Lena Paul in New Roads, Louisiana, in 1892, she moved to New Orleans at an early age. By fourteen she was being paid to help her mother and her aunt do domestic work and cook in an Esplanade Avenue mansion in that city. By the time she’d finished school she was hired by the Vairin family, who so valued her culinary talents that they sent her to perfect her skills at a local