African American Food: Since Emancipation: A Layering of Hungers

Within the African American community, tastes persisted for African foods like yams, black-eyed peas, okra, and guinea hens. But there was also a hunger for foods of slavery times made from pork and cornmeal, as well as for the fancier southern foods, such as peach pie and tea cakes, and for the small game of the South, such as raccoons, opossums, and snapping turtles. Special effort was made for Sunday dinners and church suppers, with competing pies, potato salads, fried chicken, and barbecue. This layering of hungers reflects the zigzag progress of African Americans through Reconstruction, the imposition of segregation, the period of the second Ku Klux Klan with its widespread lynching and race riots, the migrations north and west, the Great Depression, the opportunities of World War II, the civil rights era, and the retreats and advances since.