Episode 1-

The Great Migration and Black Food

 To understand African American foodways, we must first understand The Great Migration. From the 1910s to the 1970s, over 6 million African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North in one of the largest mass movements of people in U.S. history. This episode explores how this critical phenomenon not only affected African Americans economically and socially, but also brought the spread of Southern food across the country, influencing regional cuisines for years to come.

In this episode, Deb talks to:

• Dr. Frederick Douglass Opie, a professor of history and foodways at Babson College

• Adrian Miller, an author, barbecue scholar, and Black food historian

Episode highlights

The Great Migration

• Deb says that, before the Great Migration began in 1910, 90% of African Americans in the United States lived in the South.

• She outlines the two phases of the Great Migration: 

  • 1910-1940: Because of the onset of WWI, white men left their jobs for war in Europe, which opened up industrial jobs in New York, Detroit, Chicago, and Pittsburgh.

  • Post-WWII: Jobs opened up once more in the defense industry, and migration moved west to California, Oregon, and Washington.

• Dr. Opie outlines the pull and push factors that contributed to the Great Migration: Push factors included political violence and danger in the US South. Pull factors, on the other hand, included job opportunities between WWI and WWII, as well as a desire for education.

Moving Food during the Great Migration

• The proliferation of southern staples like barbecue, cornbread, and fried chicken across the United States came from the Great Migration, Dr. Opie adds.

• As demand for southern food increased across the country, a new supply chain also developed, supporting African Americans in the southern part of the country while bringing ingredients to chefs and entrepreneurs in the northern parts. The movement of ingredients to these parts of the country accelerated the spread of southern cuisine, and from that proliferation came regional specialties. 

Down Home Cooking in America

• Dr. Opie explains that both fine dining and fast food businesses serve dishes that are derivative of African American culinary traditions.

Barbecue Scholarship

• Barbecue marked festive occasions for African Americans in the south, Adrian says. This tradition was replicated when they moved north to new environments, which explains, in part, the spread of barbecue to the north. 

• The other part of the explanation pre-dates the Great Migration. African Americans were often the people who gave communities outside of the US south their first taste of barbeque. Adrian says that the spread of barbecue can also be tied to the antebellum period, when barbecue spread along with slavery.

• Adrian talks more about regional styles of barbecue. First, he says that these styles developed from riffs off of traditional practices as they were transplanted to new locations. Second, he adds that when the focus shifted from whole animal barbecue to on smaller cuts of meat, which is where, he says, you can start to see a lot of variation and regionality emerge.

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