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The 1960s was a decade of great change for the Black identity as a whole. When people in the South began to fight for Civil Rights, people in the north followed. There were sit-ins at Woolworth stores all over the state. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself came to Indianapolis’ largest auditorium in 1959, he rocked the Cable Tabernacle with the words, “A new age of justice that is dawning for the Negro challenges him to love his oppressors.”
Time began to alter the public perception of Black movements.
However, the 1960s featured an additional Black celebration, a celebration of Soul Food.
The Cultural Roots and Symbolism of Soul Food
Dishes like Oxtail, corn, and fatty pork became delicious creations born from the crops and cuts of meat that white people deemed undesirable. Soul food, as we know it today, is more of a reflection of “aspirational food habits” rather than “daily practice”. For example, even Southerners weren’t eating “what later became known as a soul food diet” on a nightly basis. However, the movement of reclaiming certain cultural foods is still important for understanding how communities were viewing their past, present, and future through food.
Understanding what the “daily food habits” were for Black families of the past is difficult and varied based on many factors.
A ‘typical’ Soul Food meal may include the following entrées; fried pork chops, fried catfish, chitlins, fried chicken; sides such as grits, okra, rice, Black-eyed peas, greens, candied yams, cornbread, and macaroni and cheese; desserts such as banana pudding, peach cobbler, pound cake, and sweet potato pie. Depending on where you’re attending dinner, these meals may be enhanced or amended by special iterations of sweet tea (Moon tea, Southern style tea, etc.) or lemonade. This does not include the special regional cuisines, such as the seafood of the Chesapeake Bay, the Creole specialties of the Gulf South, or the Lowcountry-style cooking across South Carolina and Georgia.
Certain foods are labeled as “Soul foods” because Black people saw these dishes as ways to “simultaneously nourish one’s body and to demonstrate Black cultural consciousness.” Any shared cultural experience that connected a Black person, enslaved or free, to their ancestors was seen as sacred in its own right. Still, problems arose as soul food gained popularity during the 1960s.
Popularity, Price, and Political Meaning
Increased interest in the foods by both Black and white parties significantly drove up its price. This was tragically ironic, given the fact that the original foods had historically sustained many people through poverty, especially in the South. In addition to this, some Black people wanted nothing to do with the food because of its direct ties back to enslavement and, by extension, racism faced as a result of stereotypes. Although there exists a vast variety of meats and vegetables that make up the “Soul Food” umbrella, some foods were not nutritionally fit to eat for every meal, depending on how they were prepared.
The right to food itself became somewhat of a battleground for Civil Rights in the 1960s, as “iconic American foods” became the center of “direct action protests” like the Woolworth's and McDonald's sit-ins. If a Black person couldn’t be served at an establishment that encapsulated “Americana”, then the message was clear: America was not made to accommodate Black people.
Community Solutions and the Fight for Food Justice
During this time, the (white) scientific community was focusing on problems of food insecurity and the importance of access to healthy foods. However, “white progressive reform efforts” did not take into account the issues of food insecurity that hit the Black working class the hardest. One of the most influential initiatives to combat this originated from the Tuskegee Institute. There were also programs at Hampton, Fisk, and Spellman colleges, among others.
As early as the 1930s, there were significant movements with leaders like Ella Baker, who encouraged Black-led Food Co-operatives in order to wrestle “economic power away from white business owners” across American cities. These programs were sponsored by “a wide variety of Black civic organizations and educational institutions.” They did not come without intense debate within the Black community itself. Still, they persisted, aiming to train food professionals who could work at every culinary level from schools to the White House, ensuring that people within the Black community could serve both their own neighborhoods or places of employment as competent cooks or gardeners. However, this also involved African Americans who were working around white people; creating an image of Black people assuming traditionally subservient roles in predominantly white spaces. Community leaders did have concerns about reinforcing racist stereotypes, for example, W.E.B. DuBois commented that “Negro and servant” were “synonymous terms” and he feared that stereotypes were not being challenged.
Works Cited
Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana Blacks in the Twentieth Century. (Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000), 164.
Jennifer Jensen Wallach, Every Nation has its Dish: Black Bodies and Black Food in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019),147.
Wallach, Every Nation has its Dish, 150.
Wallach, Every Nation has its Dish, 150.
Adrian Miller, Soul Food : The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press (August 2013), 4.
Wallach, Every Nation has its Dish, 168.
Wallach, Every Nation has its Dish, 173.
Wallach, Every Nation has its Dish, 174.
Wallach, Every Nation has its Dish, 174.
Wallach, Every Nation has its Dish, 159.
Wallach, Every Nation has its Dish, 160.
Wallach, Every Nation has its Dish, 31.
Wallach, Every Nation has its Dish, 34.