The Black Plate: Soul Food’s Long March to Freedom

Part 3: From Wealth to Weaponization

They came for the watermelon first. Then the fried chicken, the collard greens, the candied yams. Every dish that built Black wealth after Emancipation was eventually indicted, mocked, stolen or blamed for the health crisis that processed food corporations manufactured. Soul food has been criminalized almost as thoroughly as the people who invented it.

The numbers tell a different story. Predominantly Black neighborhoods carry 2.4 fast-food restaurants per square mile compared to 1.5 in white communities, according to the “American Journal of Preventive Medicine. The U.S. food system floods these communities with salty or sugary processed foods, dyes and chemical preservatives banned across Europe.

Yet African Americans have been led to believe that grandma’s greens and Sunday fried chicken, not the federally approved additives in products lining grocery store shelves and freezers, are responsible for the myriad chronic diseases impacting Black communities.

Dubbed “slave food,” Black Heritage Cooking was systematically labeled as poisonous and unhealthy to give pause to a cuisine that was building Black wealth, financing Black resistance and feeding a movement that threatened the racial order.

Soul food’s weaponization began the moment Black hands were free to profit from their own genius. Watermelon required no capital and could be sold immediately at market. Black farmers grew it on their own land and kept their own money, often selling the potassium-rich fruit to hungry consumers from all walks of life.

“Freed people used watermelons to enact and celebrate their freedom, especially their newfound property rights,” writes historian William R. Black in the “Journal of the Civil War Era.” “This provoked a backlash among white Americans, who then made the fruit a symbol of African Americans’ supposed uncleanliness, childishness, idleness, and unfitness for the public square.”

The same alchemy transformed fried chicken. Black women in Gordonsville, Virginia, sold fried chicken through train windows, building wealth that funded churches and purchased land. Racist imagery twisted this entrepreneurship into the “chicken-thieving” stereotype, and D.W. Griffith’s 1915 “Birth of a Nation” showed Black legislators eating fried chicken in Congress. The message needed no subtitle.

Then came the corporations that monetized what they mocked. The Aunt Jemima brand took its name from a minstrel show song performed by Billy Kersands in 1875, transforming the “mammy” stereotype into a billion-dollar trademark. Uncle Ben and Rastus followed, using what scholars call “ethnicity as authenticity” to sell products through images of Black servitude.

“This encoded message assumes that black chefs, by virtue of their race, are simply born with good kitchen instincts,” writes Toni Tipton-Martin in The Jemima Code. “It diminishes the skill and creativity involved in their work.”

The Great Migration brought six million Black Americans north, but segregation corralled them into overcrowded “kitchenettes,” single-room units with nothing more than a hot plate or shared stove. High utility costs made slow-roasting and baking impossible. Frying became the practical choice, not a cultural failing.

Without storage or gardens, families adopted hand-to-mouth shopping and turned to “rent parties,” selling plates of chitlins and hog maws to neighbors just to make the landlord’s payment.

Between 1940 and 1970, soul food restaurants had become economic engines in Black communities. Paschal’s in Atlanta and Edna’s in Chicago fed the Civil Rights Movement. Sylvia Woods built an empire in Harlem, reclaiming the “Queen of Soul Food” image through actual Black ownership.

African American restaurants flourished and almost simultaneously, the health, wellness and sociopolitical attacks against “soul food” or “slave food” began. It became routine to hear some Black consumers express embarrassment for eating watermelon or fried chicken in public, while others often lambasted certain methods as the result of culinary ignorance.

In 2006, animated series The Boondocks devoted an entire episode to soul food, called “The Itis,” a colloquial term in Black communities for the drowsy, lethargic feeling that follows a heavy meal. In the story, Granddad Robert Freeman opens a soul food restaurant backed by a white banker, where he serves dishes so rich they put customers to sleep in beds instead of booths. The restaurant’s success destroys the surrounding neighborhood as customers become addicted, lose their jobs and turn to crime for their next meal.

“The Itis,” though metaphoric, reinforced the myth that soul food not only kills those who eat it but also makes them shiftless, lazy and unproductive, while the real culprits go unseen and untouched.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  (CDC) reports that ultra-processed foods now account for 55% of calories consumed by Americans. The Food and Drug Administration banned Red Dye No. 3 in January 2025, more than 30 years after evidence linked it to thyroid cancer. Europe banned it in 1994. Red Dye No. 40, found in Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, Takis and fruit punch drinks marketed in Black neighborhoods, remains legal here though restricted in Norway, Germany and Switzerland.

“A significant threat to the broader Black community’s ability to live a flourishing life comes from our food supply in the form of highly processed foods, the abundance of fast-food restaurants in Black communities, and the minimally regulated chemical additives,” writes theologian Christopher Carter in “The Spirit of Soul Food.”

The critics ignore what grandmothers actually cooked. “Precolonial West Africans were primarily farmers who ate mostly vegetables, starches, and some meat,” writes food historian Adrian Miller. “Meat is not the centerpiece of a typical meal but is thought of more as a seasoning.” Fried chicken was Sunday food, the “Gospel Bird” reserved for after church. The everyday diet was greens, legumes and cornbread.

The Hon. Elijah Muhammad, founder of the Nation of Islam,  understood this. His book “How to Eat to Live” focused not on shame but on longevity. “Eat to live to bring about a return to perfection and long life,” he wrote. “Sugar diabetes can be controlled and cured if you only eat right.” He prescribed vegetables, fruits and navy beans, charting a path toward wellness, not away from heritage.

Black chefs across the country began to reimagine the dishes from their childhoods, passed down through the generations. Vegan and healthier recipes of favored dishes touted the benefits of soul food, but also reclaimed its nutritional value and educated the public on the proper consumption of certain dishes.

“My daddy and uncles ate heavy meals because they worked it off in the fields,” Annie Ruth Smith, 72, told the Crusader. “We weren’t eating a lot of fried chicken, ham and things—that was on special occasions or maybe on Sunday after church. My mother cooked a lot of beans and rice or greens that we enjoyed throughout the week. She made egg pie or something sweet for dessert. Nowadays, (people) eat it every day. That’s why they gaining weight.”

Today, a new generation fights back against the weaponization and stereotypes. Virtue in Chicago’s Hyde Park and Luella’s Southern Kitchen in Lincoln Square have elevated African American culinary traditions to a globally recognized, fine-dining status. Home cooks are returning to the 150-plus Black cookbooks Tipton-Martin preserved, dating to 1827 and finding new recipes expanding the African diaspora.

Carter proposes “Black veganism” as a “decolonial project” that reimagines rather than rejects soul food, and urban farmers are ensuring underserved households have access to affordable, fresh fruit and vegetables free of pesticides and exorbitant prices.

The black plate was shamed, but it endures. Georgia Gilmore understood this when she fried chicken to finance the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Every grandmother who seasoned greens with faith and/or uncles whose barbecue and fish frys fed multitudes on Saturday nights knew it too.

Soul food is the edible autobiography of a people who refused to be erased.

Next: In the final installment of the Crusader’s Black History Month series on the history of soul food and Black Heritage Cooking, part four will focus on the fight to rebuild food sovereignty.