Campbell, Tunis G

In The Philadelphia Negro, W. E. B. Du Bois praised the African American caterers of the 1840s, who “aided the Abolition cause to no little degree.” Although the caterers assumed a subservient manner, they were independent businesspeople of means who led their community toward liberation. No individual more successfully embodied this duality than Tunis Campbell (1805–1891). Born in New Jersey and educated in a Long Island Episcopal school where he was the only black student, Campbell became an African Methodist Episcopal Church elder, headwaiter, temperance preacher, baker, abolitionist, and author of the second cookbook published by an African American and was elected leader of three predominantly African American Georgia counties for eleven years. In the 1840s, he had preached equality and self-help on lonely New York street corners, and he went on to organize among newly freed slaves on the Carolina Sea Islands in the 1860s and in Georgia into the late 1870s.