Last summer, we launched a food heroes series on our social media to celebrate and lift up the vast contributions of Black Americans in food from agriculture, innovation, activism to cooking. We have barely scratched the surface. This month, we take a collective look back at the series so far.
We also recommend the recently published collection of stories via Eater in collaboration with the Museum of Food and Drink's upcoming exhibit, African/American: Making the Nation's Table.
Fannie Lou Hamer, farmer and activist
"When you've got 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, nobody can push you around or tell you what to say or do." Read more about Fannie Lou Hamer’s farming as activism in an excerpt from the book Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Dr. Monica M. White in Life & Thyme magazine.
Georgia Gilmore, cook and activist
Georgia Gilmore is a cook, midwife and activist whose secret kitchen fed the civil rights movement. She organized a group of black women who sold “pound cakes and sweet potato pies, fried fish and stewed greens, pork chops and rice at beauty salons, cab stands and churches.” Funds raised helped pay for fuel, insurance and repairs for the alternative transportation system that sprang up in Montgomery, Alabama, during the bus boycott. The group was called "The Club from Nowhere" because when money arrived to fund the movement, it needed to stay secret—or from "nowhere." Read more here.
There's also a great children's book that tells the story of this American hero called "Pies From Nowhere" for any parents who want to share this history of activism with their kids.
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, a culinary anthropologist, griot, commentator, author
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor is a culinary anthropologist, griot, commentator on NPR, and author of the classic book, “VIBRATION COOKING: The Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl.” Smart-Grosvenor, born and raised in South Carolina, moved to Paris to pursue a career in acting, before finally settling in New York City. She performed many roles in the Black Arts Movement as a dancer, costume designer, backup singer (and often a cook) for Sun Ra’s avant-garde music collective, the Solar-Myth Arkestra.
As a culinary foremother, she “detailed in various ways a feminist consciousness of community building, cultural work, and personal identity,” writes Psyche Williams-Forson, author of “Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power.”
“Smart-Grosvenor kept one eye on her community, always. She used to cook for the Free Breakfast Program for the Black Panther Party. The desire to nourish those around her was an extension of a more overarching philosophy: Think globally, but have a local address," writes @mayukh.sen.
In Smart-Grosvenor's own words from Vibration Cooking, 1970:
“This is the richest country in the world,” she wrote. “Any citizen should be given at birth the guarantee of a life free from hunger.” In the same passage, she lamented many other things—plastic flowers, instant coffee, gossip, working nine to five, the jet set and the boldness of New York City mice. She recalled the time she persuaded a visiting friend…“a revolutionary” to get rid of a mouse. “It took thirty minutes to convince him, but he did it. Just goes to show you everybody talking revolution ain’t making it.” And then she shared a recipe for their dinner, Chicken Stew and Dumplings.
Read more about the remarkable Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor here. (Note: Marie Dutton Brown, literary agent and grandmother to TNFP Community Garden Manager, Kia Brown also makes an important cameo!)
Edna Lewis, chef, teacher, author, and all around culinary inspiration
“The Taste of Country Cooking,’ published in 1976, is revered for the way it shows the simple beauty of food honestly made in the rhythm of the seasons — the now common but at the time nearly forgotten ethos of eating farm-to-table — and for the way it gave a view of Southern food that was refined and nuanced...”
Read more on “Edna Lewis and the Black Roots of American Cooking,” by @francis_lam at this link. And parents of school-age children, check out the extraordinary picture book about Chef Lewis’ childhood in Freetown, Virginia called “Bring Me Some Apples and I’ll Make You a Pie.”
Diane Nash, civil rights leader
“‘Mayor,’ she asked in a famous exchange following a 1960 march to the courthouse, ‘do you recommend that the lunch counters be desegregated?’ To the surprise of supporters and opponents of the movement, (Mayor) West said yes. A few weeks later, Nashville became the first Southern city where blacks and whites sat together for lunch.” Read more about Diane Nash at this link.
BJ Dennis, Gullah Geechee chef
Chef Dennis grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and his grandparents helped keep him in touch with the old ways of the Sea Islands by cooking him a traditional seafood-based diet as well as other classic dishes like gumbo and purloo. Essential to his role as a chef is preserving the cuisine of his ancestors, documenting its linkage to other African diaspora cuisines, and farming and using traditional crops like okra, red peas, benne seed, and callaloo in an intentional way. When speaking of Dennis, culinary historian Michael Twitty says, "He is it. But the thing about it is, he’s not trying to be it. He’s trying to raise a whole generation of people to pick this mantle up. We don’t want to be icons; we want to be griots.”
Shirley Sherrod, agriculture advocate
When Sherrod's father was the victim of a racially motivated murder, she vowed to remain in the South and work for systemic change. In the 1960s, she and her husband worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and founded a farming collective, New Communities. At 6,000 acres, New Communities was the largest tract of black-owned land AND the first Community Land Trusts (designed to provide an equitable and sustainable model of affordable housing and community development) in the United States. The project was sabotaged due to racial bias in the loan process among other issues and resulted in a successful class action lawsuit against the USDA. Sherrod was also the first black Georgia State Director of USDA Rural Development. Since departing the USDA, Sherrod has continued to serve as Executive Director of the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education, which seeks to "empower communities through grassroots organizing and technical assistance," centering on "the intersection of food, farms, and human rights." Read more about Shirley Sherrod here.
Devita Davison, executive director of FoodLab Detroit
“Many Black communities lack access to fresh, healthy, affordable food as the result of the structural inequalities. I'm talking about deliberate public and private policies and resources that have been misappropriated and extracted from, and not allocated to Black and brown neighborhoods. I'm talking about policy decisions that exclude the word 'healthy' from our community. That kind of inequality cannot be described as anything except food apartheid. When folks call our neighborhoods “food deserts,” it’s inappropriate and disrespectful because Detroiters boast about the fact that because of the Great Migration, not only did African Americans flee the rural South and come to the North, they brought skills with them including their ability to grow food, their ability to cultivate the land.”
Detroit is an epicenter of urban agriculture with more than 1600 community, school, and family farms and gardens. Davison says @foodlabdetroit creates a narrative that speaks to the richness of community, an important guide for moving the story away from a narrative of scarcity.
Hear more from Devita Davison in her conversation with @KatKinsman for @FoodandWine’s Communal Table and “How I Got Radicalized Around Food.”
The people of Soul Fire Farm
This past fall, The Nashville Food Project staff and board participated in this farm's "Uprooting Racism in the Food System" training, which we highly recommend.
"When the horizon looks bleak, I call to mind my ancestral grandmothers, who hid away their seeds of okra, cowpea, millet, and black rice in their braids before being forced onto transatlantic slave ships. Their deep yearning was to have the means to feed their own children. If they, in those unimaginable circumstances, had the audacious hope to set aside some seeds for me, who am I to give up on my own descendants? How could I not plant these seeds for all of our children?" - Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm
Malinda Russell, author of the first known cookbook published by a Black woman in the United States “A Domestic Cook Book: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen”
A working mother, cook, and former pastry shop owner in East Tennessee (where she was born and raised), Russell self-published her ground-breaking book in 1866 as a fundraising project.
“‘Southern poverty cooking was mistakenly established as the single and universal African-American cuisine,' said Leni Sorensen, a researcher at Monticello outside Charlottesville, Va., specializing in African-American history. “And then the volume by Malinda Russell surfaced."
George Washington Carver, a scientist, innovator and educator who thought holistically about the environment long before it reached mainstream.
George Washington Carver cared about helping what he called “the furthest man down,” by championing crop rotation, sustainability and the interconnectedness between the health of the land and health of the people who lived on it. Born into slavery, he lives on today as an American icon of agriculture and ingenuity.
Read more at “In Search of George Washington Carver’s True Legacy: The famed agriculturalist deserves to be known for much more than peanuts.”
Zephyr Wright. personal chef
Born and raised in Texas, Zephyr Wright began working for the Johnsons (President Lyndon B. Johnson & Lady Bird Johnson) as a maid and cook to help pay her way through college. While Johnson was in Congress, his home and table where politicians gathered became known for good food because of Wright’s dishes like chile con queso and peach cobbler. She ended up staying with the family through Johnson’s presidency.
Wright also shared her experiences with discrimination, which is thought to have influenced work on civil rights reform. When Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Wright was there. He handed her the pen he used and said, “You deserve this more than anybody else.”
Sarah Estell, culinary entrepreneur
Have you seen this historical marker on 5th Avenue in downtown Nashville? This week’s food history is local — Sarah Estell, the free Black woman and culinary entrepreneur who ran an ice cream parlour, catering service and boarding house downtown during the 1840s to the 1860s.
Cleo Johns, catering pioneer of Cleo’s La Cuisine
Johns worked for most of her career in Maplewood, New Jersey, for many clients in New York City. “I sometimes do seven parties a day, including luncheons and dinners serving 30 to 4,000 people,“ she told The New York Times in 1973.
Therese Nelson, a Black culinary historian, food writer and caterer told Huffington Post: “Catering was the culinary battle ground for Black agency and authority in American gastronomy. And as a caterer, I’m always on the lookout for those names because they give us the receipts of culinary excellence that assert our legacy in this industry before it was respectable, lucrative and revered work.” of Cleo’s La Cuisine who worked for most of her career in Maplewood, New Jersey, for many clients in New York City. “I sometimes do seven parties a day, including luncheons and dinners serving 30 to 4,000 people,“ she told The New York Times in 1973.
Karen Washington, community activist and farmer
Washington has been called “urban farming’s de facto godmother.” As a community gardener and board member of the New York Botanical Gardens, she worked with Bronx neighborhoods to turn empty lots into growing spaces. She launched or has led many other initiatives including Black Urban Growers (BUGS), City Farms Market and New York City Community Garden Coalition. She received the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award and has been named to Ebony magazine’s “Power 100.”
“To grow your own food gives you power and dignity. You know exactly what you’re eating because you grew it. It’s good, it’s nourishing and you did this for yourself, your family and your community.” - Karen Washington
Read more at “How Urban Agriculture Can Fight Racism in the Food System.”
Ben Burkett, advocate and farmer
Burkett is a long-time advocate for Black farmers who grows food in Petal, Mississippi on land that has been in his family since 1889. He has been an activist for more than 30 years, speaking, writing, and organizing for the rights of independent family farmers.
Learn more at “In the Fields with Ben Burkett.”
Mary Eliza Church Terrell, activist
Mary Eliza Church Terrell was “a well-known African American activist who championed racial equality and women’s suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th century. Later in 1950, at age 86, she challenged segregation in public places by protesting the John R. Thompson Restaurant in Washington, DC. She was victorious when, in 1953, the Supreme Court ruled that segregated eating facilities were unconstitutional, a major breakthrough in the civil rights movement. The daughter of former slaves, Terrell was born in Memphis.” Read more at this link.
Dr. Booker T. Whatley, a founding father of Community Supported Agriculture.
"Beginning in the early 1970s, an Alabama horticulturist and Tuskegee University professor named Booker T. Whatley started promoting direct marketing as a tool for small farmers. This took the form of what he called 'clientele membership clubs,' as well as pick-your-own farms. Whatley traveled widely, giving as many as 50 seminars a year, and produced a small-farms newsletter with 20,000-some subscribers." - Grist magazine
Dr. Charles Henry Turner, many accomplishments including the discovery that bees could see color and recognize patterns and shapes
Shared via @40acresproject by Adrian Lipscombe—a chef, restaurant owner, city planner, mother (and food hero in her own right)—working to preserve the history and stories of Black culture in food and farming.
Repost via @40acresproject:
Our scientists don’t get enough praise, and one of them is Dr. Charles Henry Turner. Dr. Turner was born in Ohio in 1867 to parents who encouraged him to read, and supported him in his scientific career. He was the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Chicago. Despite publishing 30 papers upon receiving his doctorate, he was denied an academic appointment at the University of Chicago because of his race. He applied to teach at The Tuskegee Institute, but Booker T. Washington had George Washington Carver on staff and couldn’t afford to pay both salaries. Dr. Turner spent his early academic years teaching at several high schools before settling at Sumner High School in St. Louis, MO.
While teaching high school, Dr. Turner continued his research, publishing an average of two papers a year, more than his contemporaries working at colleges and universities. His research was considered extraordinary considering the organisms he chose to study, including: ants, bees, cockroaches, crustaceans, moths, pigeons, spiders, and wasps.
Keep in mind that he did all his experiments with little or no access to formal laboratory facilities and access to research libraries —where he wasn’t permitted.
Dr. Turner’s most accomplished research, which is still studied in science books today, was to show that insects can learn and alter their behavior from their experiences. He also discovered that bees could see color and recognize patterns and shapes. This was used to maneuver and avoid obstacles. (More at @40acresproject.)
Klancy Miller, editor in chief, For the Culture magazine
“I hope people take away the richness of experiences of Black women and femmes in food and wine, and I hope they take away some really interesting stories,” she says. Read more about Klancy Miller and "For the Culture,” at this link.
Mary McLeod Bethune, founder, National Council of Negro Women
The following post comes from award-winning author Toni Tipton Martin from her excellent #BlackHistoryMonth cookbook series.
Repost from @tonitiptonmartin:
Cooking and cookbook writing are quiet forms of disruption that Black activist cooks and authors have used to stabilize their communities. In the late 1950s, they promoted democracy, celebrated cultural and culinary achievement, and expressed their humanitarian spirits using whatever resources and special ingredients they had at their disposal. Sometimes that meant teaching food safety and preservation as county extension agents in rural areas. Urban cooks made sandwiches in off-the-grid outlets and toted pans of fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, greens, and cornbread to clandestine meetings of tired civil rights leaders planning a resistance movement in church basements and private homes all across the South.
Mary McLeod Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935 “to educate, encourage and effect the participation of Negro women in civic, political, economic, and educational activities and institutions” and to “emphasize the important role of African-American women in the creation of a better society.” In 1958, the NCNW joined the parade of Negro Women’s Clubs publishing cookbooks with The Historical Cookbook of the American Negro, a unique recipe collection and history book that honored black achievement and promoted “diversity and democracy.” NCNW members representing seven regional councils contributed their favorite dishes and gathered biographical sketches of world figures, accounts of cultural heritage, photographs of historic places, and important dates in order to tell a broader African American history.
Bottom line: Bethune’s community-minded culinary spirit, captured in words written above a college chalkboard, instilled dignity and confidence in culinary students. Those powerful words quietly inspirited my social media profile photo for years: “Cease to be a drudge, seek to be an artist.”
The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks
Do you have a food hero you would like to see profiled? Please tell us about it!