High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [97]
The Civil Rights organizations brought the movement to the daily consciousness of a nation, and gains were won. But it took the Freedom Riders; more boycotts; the murder of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi; a march on Washington, D.C.; the bombing of four little girls in a Birmingham church; the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; and countless other acts of violence before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. The act banned discrimination in places of public accommodation, including restaurants, hotels, gas stations, and entertainment facilities, as well as schools, parks, playgrounds, libraries, and swimming pools. The 1964 act, unlike some that had preceded it, had potential for enforcement, since it mandated that government funds could be withheld from any program that did not comply. It created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to ensure that there was no longer discrimination in the country based on race, or on color, gender, religion, or country of national origin. The yoke had been lifted, but the battle for full equality was not over by any means.
The Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1960s was a crucial turning point in the history of African Americans and food: It not only emphasized the importance that food had held within the African American context but also placed the important role that African Americans played in the food of the country front and center. In a memorable photograph of the second day of the Greensboro sit-in, the four young men, Blair, McCain, McNeil, and Richmond, sit at the counter. On the other side of the counter is a server, an African American who seems more than abashed to be placed in such a position. The menu offerings posted on the walls are the simple fast food of a prior generation: sandwiches, plate lunches, and sweet desserts, culinarily nothing worth fighting for. The story is a complex one, unlocking a history of racial interaction in the country. While many Southern whites were content with being served by African Americans who held the job of restaurant cook, home domestic, or lunch counterman, they were not prepared to share their space at the counter or the table with those from whose hands they were served daily. The inherent absurdity of the racial contradiction that for centuries was emblematic of the South resonates in that photo capturing the era’s transforming moment.
While the sit-ins were being held in the South, planning activities for civil disobedience around the country took African Americans and their food to a wider audience. Kitchen tables and black restaurants had become, along with churches of all denominations, traditional planning places for the movement. At them, white liberals from the North, who’d traveled to the South for sit-ins and later for Freedom Rides and voter registration and protest marches, got what for many was their first taste of the savory, well-seasoned traditional African American menu. When they returned home, they ventured into black neighborhoods in search of restaurants serving the same dishes and contributed to the mainstream awareness of the traditional black diet. The popularizing of African American traditional foods went hand in hand with a growing pride in race and in self in the African American community.
For the younger generation, the Civil Rights Movement morphed into the Black Power movement, and there was a growing pride in things black and in the culture that had survived enslavement. It went hand in hand with a hunger to learn more about the black experience and a national feeling of solidarity among blacks. In the early 1960s this pride