Picnic Customs, History, and Fare

African Americans celebrate June 10 with picnics in remembrance of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Angela Shelf Medearis’s The African-American Kitchen: Cooking from Heritage (1997) suggests a picnic menu of jerk pork, potato salad, pickled beets, red rice, roasted potatoes, and pecan cake.

Two company picnics were held in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s hometown—one for whites and another for African Americans. In Colored People: A Memoir (1994), Gates recalls that there was a traditional meal of fried chicken, and he is nostalgic about how corn was cooked in a huge black cast-iron vat, set on cinder blocks and fueled by pinewood. Gates fondly recalls sipping coffee doused with sweet cream while waiting for the water to boil.