Feeding a Community: Black Farmers, Cooks, and Food Workers
Food Sharing is Caregiving
“When you ran out of flour, you could go to your neighbor’s house and get a cup.”
- Keith Edwards, resident of Chapel Hill
For generations, neighbors have taken care of each other by sharing food. From informal arrangements when neighbors are in need to formal institutions like Heavenly Groceries, the neighborhood food bank, ensuring that all community members have access to food is a staple of community care work in the Black neighborhoods of southern Orange County.
Black Restaurateurs are Community Protectors
“When Ms. Dip opened up her restaurant, she would every Friday—when my mom wasn't able to cook anymore—she would give her lunch every Friday, so I would just go up and pick up her lunch from Ms. Dip, and she would do that as long as mom was living and able to eat. Which was really a blessing.”
- Kathy Atwater, resident of the Northside neighborhood
Black-owned restaurants are important places, not only as safe spaces for gathering, but also for their historic role in sustaining an independent Black business economy prior to desegregation. Restaurants like Bill’s Bar-B-Que and M&N Grill were spaces where community members, especially Black youth, could safely interact with each other and socialize during Jim Crow. Connected to a network of Black-owned businesses, their profits recirculated throughout the community. Supporting Black-owned businesses meant supporting the autonomous economy that sustained the community in the face of white supremacy.
Black Farmers Provide Sustenance to Keep Their Communities Going
“...my grandparents’ house was the house where everybody came to. Everybody—nobody would ever go hungry ‘cause they had the food, they lived on a farm.”
- Regina Merritt, granddaughter of farmers in the Councilville neighborhood
Many community elders have memories of working on their family’s farm or garden patch during the summer, growing food that would supply their family and others. While the number of Black-owned farms in the US has greatly decreased over the past century, local Black-owned farms and family gardens have provided community members with ongoing access to healthy food, promoting self-sufficiency outside of the low-wage service economy.
Food Fueled an Alternative Economy
Food was an essential part of sustaining an alternative Black-neighborhood-based economy prior to integration. Community members traded and bartered goods and services for food, bypassing white-owned grocery stores and keeping economic resources within the Black community. This system also gave community members without money for groceries access to food.
Baking Bread and Breaking Bread Sustains Community
“On Sundays, everybody would come after church and come there and eat, the pastors and all [of them]. We weren’t the wealthiest, but we were always full.”
-Gracie Webb, resident of the Northside neighborhood and member of St. Joseph CME Church
Food brings people together. It is central to many traditions and memories in the Black communities of southern Orange County. Adults prepare dishes to bring to potlucks, women come together in church kitchens to prepare food for those in need, and men take over the grills for block parties. Sharing food at a potluck or eating together at a party creates and nurtures bonds between people, sustaining a healthy community.
Food connects generations, as grandparents share recipes with grandchildren and families cook the recipes of kindred who have passed. It also brings people into the community, as newcomers experience foods they have never tried and incorporate them into their own traditions. While the food itself and the care work that goes into it are important, the relationships built through breaking bread are what builds community.
White-owned Restaurants Were Sites of Protest
“...we had Colonial Drugstore, the Rock Quarry, and a number of other restaurants around here that we were able to desegregate. And what it caused – students, with the leadership of some adults like Hilliard Caldwell and some others – we began to demonstrate and ask the people for service at the lunch counter, stuff like that, and they refused. So we would boycott and picket 'em.”
- Fred Battle, resident of the Windy Hill neighborhood and Civil Rights activist
Restaurants are sites of gathering and community, but in Chapel Hill they have also been sites of collective protest against white supremacy. White restaurateurs and workers during Jim Crow denied entry to Black patrons. During the Civil Rights Movement, many segregated restaurants downtown provoked sit-ins, picketing, and other protests. Community activists protested for years, calling for ordinances requiring the desegregation of places of public accommodation. However, the Chapel Hill government refused, pushing instead for a slow, voluntary desegregation process. Those segregated restaurants were more than just places to eat; they were sites of contention where white-owned businesses, white employees, and the larger white Chapel Hill community fought to exclude Black community members.
