High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [95]
For African American soldiers returning from the war, life was different. Some certainly were able to take advantage of the benefits the war had brought, but there was also a renewed sense of the urgent need for full equality. After all, they’d bandaged the wounded, fed the forces, helped on the home front in the armament factories and the naval yards; they’d done all the dirty work. The glorious Tuskegee Airmen had even guided American bombers to their destinations, never losing a plane. It was time for the country that had ignored or neglected them for generations to step up and finally make things equal. Returning black soldiers arrived home with a different attitude toward the second-class citizenship that had been their lot. Different racial attitudes in Europe had also confirmed that the American way of life was not the only way. There was a better way to be, and it was time for the United States to understand that. African American soldiers were not coming home from the fronts to be shut out of the American dream once again.
Returning African American soldiers came back to a South that was rigidly segregated: education, housing, public accommodations, and dining were strictly delineated according to color. Jim Crow laws still affected Southern voters, making the disenfranchisement complete. In the North, an increasingly affluent white middle-class population moved to the newly constructed suburbs. They left the Northern blacks—who had moved to the urban centers in search of jobs that were declining in a postwar economy—relegated to living in inner-city neighborhoods that were slumping into deterioration. Then, in 1954, the Supreme Court decision in the case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka began a series of legal decisions that eradicated the Jim Crow laws and brought the possibility of full equality closer to reality. It declared, “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The decision, followed in 1955 by another referred to as Brown II, mandated that the dismantling of the unequal school systems should begin with “all deliberate speed.” Change was about to come to America.
After an initial brief period of calm, during which it looked as though the process might be attained through legislative means, the decisions were met with massive resistance on the part of white Southern hard-liners, who were more than willing to fight to maintain the “Southern way of life.” The lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 defined in the minds of many African Americans north and south just what the “Southern way of life” had been for blacks for more than 350 years. The press for equality escalated. The Montgomery bus boycott brought Rosa Parks immortality and Martin Luther King Jr. fame and set the stage for and defined future protests. The increasing protests depended on highly organized black communities with capable and committed leaders. They were well orchestrated to not only attain small goals but also focus national attention on the South and on the need for racial equality in the country. Activists used a network of black churches. They also met at local black restaurants, like Atlanta’s Paschal’s and New Orleans’s Dooky Chase, and in private homes, where they gathered around kitchen tables to strategize over platters of the traditional foods of the African American South—like fried chicken, collard greens, and macaroni and cheese—as they planned their campaigns.
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a loose confederation of churches, community organizations, and civil rights groups, was formed, and it started