Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America

by Frederick Douglass

  Clara Pittman observed that black power in northern California inspired black people finally to stand up for their rights and “speak for themselves,” openly expressing a pride in their unique African heritage and an awareness of the contributions they made to American society. During the 1960s and 1970s, she was in her early twenties, just out of the Marine Corps, and living in northern California (not far from Oakland where Bobby Seal and Huey P. Newton started the Black Panther Party in 1966).12

  In Westchester County, New York, black power did not have the kind of popularity or influence it had in the District of Columbia and northern California. Westchester residents born before the Depression had little to no experience with black power. For example, Ella Barnett, born in 1915, claimed “black power didn’t mean anything to me. It really didn’t make a difference.”13 Margaret Opie and Sundiata Sadique, however, both Westchester activists born in the 1930s, had a very different interpretation of the influence of black power in the county. Starting in the 1960s, Opie became very involved in local, county, and national politics. She held positions such as membership chair of the Ossining NAACP and director of the Center for Peace in Justice, which was started in Ossining and is now a countywide organization located in the county seat in the city of White Plains. She also held the position of director of the Ossining Economic Opportunity Center (one of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty programs) and was a 1972 delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Miami representing Westchester County.14

  Sundiata Sadique, formerly Walter Brooks, moved to Westchester County in 1963 from just across the Hudson River in nearby Rockland County. After high school, he joined the U.S. Army, where he was a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne. After his tour was up, Sadique spent a brief period in Chicago, where the message of the Nation of Islam’s Elijah Muhammad and the Fruit of Islam (all the adult male members of the Nation who were trained in self-defense) attracted his attention. Before returning to Rockland County, he became a member of both the Nation and the Fruit of Islam. In Rockland, he served first as secretary of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and later became the chairman of the CORE chapter there. He came to Ossining in 1967 with Bill Scott, the chairman of Rockland County’s CORE chapter. When Sadique first arrived in Ossining, he took a job cutting hair at George Watson’s barbershop. From the town’s only black barbershop he started recruiting and organizing blacks for both the Nation and CORE, selling copies of the newspaper Malcolm X started while he was a member of the Nation, Muhammad Speaks. (The photographer for the Nation of Islam, Bernard Jenkins, also lived in Ossining.)15

  During the 1960s and 1970s, the Nation, CORE, and the Black Panthers all launched organizing efforts in Westchester County. The Nation, an exclusively alternative black nationalist religious organization, had better results than the overtly political organizing efforts of CORE and the Black Panthers. Sadique and other members of the Nation living in Westchester County made the thirty-minute car or train trip to Harlem to attend Malcolm X’s Temple No. 7. Elijah Muhammad assigned Malcolm to New York to recruit the large number of blacks that lived in Harlem and the greater New York area.16

  In his early days, Malcolm and his lieutenants carried out their proselytizing efforts in front of the Theresa Hotel located next to the Chock Full o’ Nuts Café at Seventh Avenue and 125th Street. Malcolm, a tall, handsome redhead, delivered his charismatic Black Nationalist critique of the problems of black society and the solutions offered by Elijah Muhammad standing on top of a wooden soapbox. In addition to his street-corner oratory, Malcolm and his followers at Temple No. 7 operated several restaurants in Harlem and a black nationalist newspaper with a distribution network that extended as far as the city of Peekskill in northern Westchester County. As Malcolm’s popularity increased, African Americans in and around Harlem flocked to hear him preach. Malcolm remained the minister in charge in Harlem until he left the Nation in 1964. Recruiting efforts continued to go very well after Malcolm’s departure, however, as evidenced by the establishment of a Nation of Islam temple and restaurant in the lower Westchester County city of Mount Vernon.17

  In contrast to the Nation, CORE first came to northern Westchester to address problems within the local fire departments. In Peekskill, racist members of the city’s full-time professional fire department denied African American firemen the right to ride on city fire trucks, forcing the men to take taxis to fires. Similarly, racist members of the Ossining Volunteer Fire Department practiced a policy of blackballing that shut out African American volunteers. Despite its valiant efforts, CORE was unable to establish a local chapter in Ossining. The Black Panthers had similar organizing difficulties in northern Westchester.18

  In the 1970s the Black Panthers established chapters in Chicago and New York City. They also attempted to make inroads into Westchester County with breakfast programs in poor black neighborhoods. In Ossining, however, where Sing Sing Prison was located, most African Americans viewed outsiders like CORE and the Black Panther organizers with contempt, fear, and suspicion.19

  The older generation of African Americans, most of them southern migrants like Ella Barnett, were politically very conservative and disagreed with black power and black nationalism. Younger black folk feared law enforcement officials. Sundiata Sadique recalls that when he moved to Ossining, fear of the police paralyzed many black residents. Young activists like Margaret Opie, who became politically mobilized as members of the NAACP in Westchester, simply did not trust outside political operatives representing CORE and the Panthers. Maybe they suspected that they might really be undercover agents.20

  Back in the 1940s, Westchester County had become an unfriendly place for black activists and the message of black power. The county had become like a police state, perhaps in response to the Peekskill Riots of 1949 and the communist hysteria surrounding the Rosenbergs’ execution at Sing Sing Prison in1953. “This was like a prison town and a police state to me when I started living here,” says Sundiata Sadique. “Black people were very afraid of law enforcement. So I think it had something to do with the prison, you know if you go back to the Rosenbergs when they saw that, when they were electrocuted in Sing Sing and the kind of turnout of the racist. . . so it took a while” to get black folks organized. Basically, all they had in African American communities in the county was the NAACP.21 For many African Americans in the county, then, black power never made significant inroads.

  In general, black power never gained the popularity and mass appeal of soul. Black power advanced soul ideology because it championed the study of African culture and the development of a black consciousness. It also encouraged African Americans to imitate the black power movement’s example of adopting Africanisms: African dress, natural hairstyles, soul music, and soul food. Black power proponents argued that for too long white society had been declaring that African American culture was not worthy of respect. In reaction, African Americans sought to develop a new cultural identity through soul that would unite and guide the black power movement. Before the country could be changed, however, the African American community had to redefine its cultural values and reject white acculturation. Like wearing African attire or sporting an Afro, eating soul food in the 1960s and 1970s represented a political statement for those with a new black consciousness, “a declaration of the right,” writes Rustin, “and the necessity to be different.”22

  SOUL

  In the 1960s and 1970s soul became the requirement for entrance and acceptance in African American communities. At the same time, soul helped upwardly mobile and assimilated African Americans stay connected with their roots after their migration to largely white suburban communities. Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin argues that the “soul renaissance” challenged college-educated African Americans with mobility to “say no” to the impulse to assimilate into white society and thus forfeit their blackness. It deified black church culture, natural hair, ghetto life, black music, and soul food. In Rustin’s words, it was the sudden discovery
that “black is beautiful and that white is not necessarily right; it was a card of identity, a pass key to a private club, a membership in a mystical body to which Negroes belonged by birthright and from which whites for a change were excluded by the color of the their skins.”23

  Soul ideology from the 1960s also maintained that African Americans had hard-earned experiential wisdom that came from growing up black in America. That is, through years of surviving racism in the Americas, people of African descent had developed a natural instinct and intuitive understanding of how to make something wonderful out of the simple or out of what wealthier folks claimed had no apparent value. In the same vein, soul intuition informed African American cultural productions such as dress, music, and food. Soul is a hunch about what is good in a racist society that defines most cultural productions associated with black folk as inferior. Soul intuition is an African American trait that developed as Africans negotiated the Atlantic slave trade, slavery, and jim crow. It served black people as a necessary collective consciousness developed largely out of the limited resources that white society granted African American people who were forced to adapt to ghetto environments.24

  In the early 1960s business owners in northern black communities like Harlem utilized soul vocabulary to attract black customers. But soul was not just a commercial creation. African Americans in northern inner-city neighborhoods started identifying with the poor man’s music and food that they enjoyed and reminded them of their southern roots according to “race rather than region,” writes one sociologist.25

  Alton Hornsby, Jr., grew up in southeast Atlanta in the 1940s and 1950s. Back then, black people didn’t talk about soul food. “They would just say chitlins, pigs’ feet, southern fried chicken, etc., [and] barbecue, just things that black folk ate and some white folk.” He goes on to say, “I don’t remember the term ‘soul food’ coming into such popularity until about the same time as the early phases of the civil right movement. . . . Then it was being referred to as soul food and also soul music. We used to call it rock and roll. Then about that time the names ‘soul food’ and ‘soul music’ began to be used more commonly.”26

  Thus, starting with the 1960s, urban dwellers in cities like Atlanta gradually made the transition from talking about rock music (rhythm and blues) and southern food to calling it soul music and soul food. In the face of the ethnic diversity of northern cities, soul became associated with African American culture and ethnicity. People with soul had a down-home style that migrants from the rural South could unite around. For this working class, composed predominantly of underemployed urban dwellers, soul made them members of a special group of cultural experts. Soul gave them privileges in a racist society that denied them opportunities, and it emerged as a counterculture that undermined white authority.

  African Americans took the common knowledge about how to cook and eat soul food as a source of collective identity. Soul food, like soul music, represented another example of the subculture that served as an exclusive African American club, off limits to those who did not live the black experience. The use of soul food as part of the black experience becomes difficult, because there is no single black experience, just as there is no one type of soul food. Descriptions of soul food from the 1960s and 1970s illustrate this point.27

  SOUL FOOD DEFINED

  Some argue that soul food is basically southern food. “I don’t know any of those so-called soul food items that southern Euro-Americans particularly did not eat,” says Alton Hornsby, Jr., who has spent his life in Atlanta, Georgia, with the exception of short stints in Nashville, Tennessee, and Austin, Texas.28 Natives of the black belt region of Alabama and South Carolina (born in 1933 and 1928, respectively) make similar observations.29 Interviews reveal that differences in cuisine are more regional than ethnic; black and white folk in the South ate according to essentially African American-shaped culinary traditions formed over hundreds of years. The differences in eating habits are greater between northerners and southerners of any race than between white and black southerners.30

  Ella Barnett, for example, a professional caterer for over fifty years in Westchester County, observed that the food requests from white and black clients were very different.31 According to the 1930 census records, however, at that time most of the county’s African American population had been born in the South or raised by one or more parents born in the South. In contrast, most of the white population had been born in the North, born in Europe (Italy, Ireland, Eastern Europe), or raised by one or more parents that were European.32

  Over the years, Barnett found that her white clients “didn’t know nothing about soul food” and “never had anything like that.” It was her African American clients that wanted a “little bit different” kind of cooking: “Black folks want pigs’ fit [sic] and chitlins and stuff like that.” Soul food, says Barnett, is “black folk’s food, that’s what I call it.”33 Reginald T. Ward, Joseph “Mac” Johnson, and Clara Pittman all define soul food as the “food that you were brought up on.”34

  A part-time caterer and superb cook of southern cuisine, Reginald T. Ward left Robinsonville in Martin County, North Carolina, the day after graduating from high school in 1962. “In my hometown there was no work,” he said. “I graduated from high school on a Wednesday, and on Thursday I was gone.” He first migrated to California to attend UCLA. After completing school, he migrated to the southern Westchester city of Mount Vernon, where his brother lived. His brother had left for New York years before, taking a room in a boardinghouse owned by women who had previously lived seven miles from the Wards’ home in North Carolina. “We all had friends that lived in our town that migrated to Mount Vernon,” says Ward. “Some of the kids that I grew up with were living there at the time.” He asserts that soul food was food that they had all enjoyed as children in North Carolina. It was food that had “flavor and taste.”35

  Joseph “Mac” Johnson was born in Banks, Alabama, in Pike’s County, in 1933. He is a retired professional cook and restaurateur living in Poughkeepsie, in Dutchess County, New York. During World War II, his father had migrated to Poughkeepsie to work in an elevator factory and sent money home to his family, who were tenants on a dairy farm. Mac went into the military after high school and worked as a cook. After his tour, he took a job as a dishwasher for the state of New York at the Hudson River Psychiatric Center in Poughkeepsie. By 1952 he was the head cook at the center. He went to school and advanced to a position at the Bureau of Nutrition Services, among other jobs for the state of New York. From 1966 to the 1980s he operated a very profitable take-out-only venue, simply called Joe’s Barbecue, that specialized in chopped barbecue and other southern soul food dishes. Posting only professionally made signs and menus, requiring his employees to wear uniforms, and keeping the barbecue stand spotless, Johnson successfully marketed southern food to both black and white customers.36

  According to Johnson, soul food is inexpensive food that is “seasoned so good that it fascinates you.” He adds, “I am seventy-two years old, the things that they sell now you could go to the slaughter house [in urban areas of Alabama] and they would give them to you. Pigs’ feet, they would give to you, spare ribs,” and chitlins. “So you had to learn to cook those things.”37 Interestingly, when the food industry started marketing southern African American cookery such as soul food in the 1960s, supermarkets started putting “their soul food on display in frozen packages, cellophane-wrapped bags, and instant-mix boxes,” writes an author in a 1969 article published in the African American magazine Sepia. In the late 1960s whites in the food industry began making money off soul food after years of laughing at the black women who collected the hogs’ ears and pigs’ feet that slaughterhouses and butcher shops discarded. “Your corner A&P right now may be stocking boxes and bags and cans of prepared soul food,” says the article in Sepia, “guaranteed authentic, no doubt, by a Soul Housekeeping seal-of-approval.”38

  Clara Pittman, who grew up in Pinehurst, Georgia, and St. Petersb
urg, Florida, agrees with Ward and Johnson’s definition of soul food. She says that before soul food became profitable for grocers, when she was growing up in the 1950s, it “was basically all the food that blacks had to eat. It was the least expensive and the only food they could afford to buy.” She adds, “I would say on average of three or four days a week you had either necks, bones, or chitlins, or pigs’ feet, with some greens, or some type of corn bread or biscuits or whatever.”39

  In the city of Mount Vernon, New York, North Carolinian Reginald Ward remembers that in the 1960s he and fellow southerner Eugene Watts survived on similar kinds of inexpensive meals prepared at a restaurant called Green’s Royal Palm. According to Ward, that place “kept me and Gene alive!” Like Gene Watts, the owner of Green’s Royal Palm was a migrant from Virginia. “We went there every morning, every day, because it was what we could afford,” says Ward. “Everything he had was affordable. He had fatback and biscuits, with a cup of coffee would have cost you about sixty-five cents.” Ward adds, “The biscuit was huge! Then he made chicken gizzards and chicken necks in a stew over rice.” A large serving of the stew and rice filled you up, and it only cost about $1.50.40 Alton Hornsby of Atlanta argues that economics reasons might have caused black southerners to eat more of what today we call soul food items in larger quantities than did white southerners, but every poor person struggling to survive ate soul food on a regular basis.41