The culinary tradition known as “soul food” has been widely celebrated, as jazz music has been celebrated, as part of African American culture. This book offers a broad look at the history of soul food, as it came to be called during the black power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and at its social and religious meanings, particularly its relationship to the concept of “soul” itself. In recent years, many food scholars, food enthusiasts, cookbook authors, and others have debated what events, forces, and movements shaped the development of African American foodways, but few have turned their attention to...

Starting in the 1490s, the Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese) scramble to exploit the land and labor of the Americas led to cross-cultural contacts among Amerindians (Native Americans across the American continent), Europeans, and Africans. This led to the creolization, or mixing, of cultures, as Europeans, Amerindians, and Africans interacted for the first time in the New World. The environment (topography, climate, etc.) and the availability of plants, animals, and fish both influenced the creolization process through the creation of regional differences. Other factors that affected creolization included contact with Europeans and Africans before and during the Middle Passage (travel from...

When and in what ways did Africans develop new cooking and eating habits after arriving in the Americas? In Africa, they had developed ways of cooking and eating related to their distinctive cultures and tribes. After being sold into captivity during the Atlantic slave trade, they were suddenly forced to interact with all sorts of people in a variety of cultural and physical environments. Exposure to new and different people, as well as to new and different plants and animals for producing food, caused them to “shift emphasis from their old staples to the buckra‘s [Igbo word for white people]...

By the nineteenth century, the invention of the cotton gin and steam-powered cotton textile mills had revolutionized the North American South. In the now-independent United States, cotton emerged as the premier cash crop. By 1811 the cotton gin had expedited the processing of cotton, which led to more cotton being planted, which in turn required more slaves to tend and harvest it. As a result enslaved African labor gradually dominated the South, creating a belt of territory where blacks made up the majority of the population. The industrial revolution and the invention of the steam engine increased travel throughout the...

When World War I started in Europe in 1914, food prices in the southern United States increased, and a business depression occurred that lasted until the summer of 1915. In addition, the boll weevil’s destruction of black belt cotton crops and the flooding of some sections of the South and beyond led to a shortage of crops in 1916 and low demand for agricultural workers. There was also a “demand for labor in the North and higher wages offered there,” according to a 1919 black migration study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor.¹

For the first time in their...

Migrants from the South and the Caribbean came to New York, Chicago, and other northern cities during the Depression in search of opportunity. In their home regions, they worked most often as agricultural laborers, waiters, domestic servants, and porters. Up north, migrant men gained a foothold in the metalworking, automobile, meatpacking, and construction industries. Women most often worked as domestics and in commercial laundries, and the less skilled branches of the garment industry. Within a given industry, migrants were likely to be assigned the least-paying job on a piecework basis. By 1929, however, New York City, the center of the...

Black folk bought and thoroughly enjoyed soul food long before restaurant owners and cookbook writers started using the term. Before the emergence of the civil rights and black power movements, African American cooks working at segregated restaurants, barbecue stands, bars and grills, and nightclubs helped establish consumer demand for what became known as soul food in the late 1960s. Jim crow policies ensured that black restaurants remained separate black spaces. For working-class blacks, these eateries enabled them to relax and recover from the stress of racial politics in North America.¹

Many of the eateries owed their success to the jim...

Born and raised in Augusta, Georgia, singer, songwriter, and choreographer James Brown is considered the undisputed father of soul. In his autobiography, he writes that by 1962 soul “meant a lot of things—in music and out. It was about the roots of black music, and it was kind of a pride thing, too, being proud of yourself and your people.” He adds, “Soul music and the civil rights movement went hand in hand, sort of grew up together.”¹ Before the civil rights movement, black entertainers like Brown, B. B. King, Ray Charles, Al Green, Gladys Knight, Nina Simone, and...

In the summer of 2005, while combing through the 1930 census records for Westchester County, New York, to locate southern black migrants for research I was doing on the Great Migration and the Great Depression, I noticed that African Americans and Latinos (Chileans, Puerto Ricans, Iberians, Mexicans, and Argentines) tended to reside in the same lowerincome neighborhoods in the villages of North Tarrytown (now Sleepy Hollow) and Tarrytown. Earlier, I had also noticed that WPA records described blacks and Latinos in 1930s eating in the same restaurants, frequenting the same nightclubs and theaters, and intermarrying in Harlem, thirty-five miles to...

During the 1960s and 1970s several debates developed over soul food. Some African American intellectuals such as Amiri Baraka and Verta Mae Grosvenor argued that soul food was a unique part of black culture and therefore the intellectual capital of black folk. European American food critics like Craig Claiborne insisted that soul food was a southern regional food that belonged to southerners. And three groups of African Americans I call “food rebels” argued that soul food is nothing to be celebrated or guarded as our own because it was killing us. I argue that black Muslims, advocates of natural food...

Desegregation, urban renewal programs, poor business practices, and the death of the original owners of some restaurants caused the closing of some community soul food eateries. There are still barbecue rib and chicken shacks in large cities and smaller African American communities across the country. Older, larger, more established soul food restaurants like Sylvia Woods’s in Harlem and Pascal’s in southwest Atlanta have expanded over time.

Sylvia’s renovated its Harlem facility near 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard and built a room for catered events. These additions allowed the restaurant to stay in competition with Amy Ruth’s soul food restaurant,...