To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South by Angela Jill Cooley (review)

In this fascinating look at the social and legal effects of changing foodways in the twentieth-century South, Angela Jill Cooley argues that white southerners prioritized racial and gender control as they adapted first to a new urban culture and then to a mass consumer economy. In the Progressive era, white housekeepers marginalized African American cooks by promoting “euthenics”—a pseudoscience created by home economics founder Ellen H. Richards oriented toward improving the white race through imposing certain household standards (p. 30). After World War II, white southern proprietors turned to the language of personal rights and what Cooley terms the “myth of private space” to justify segregated public eating spaces (p. 136). Throughout the book, Cooley charts how white southerners benefited from the trends that made food more democratic—economic growth and nationalizing food practices—while claiming that the democratic legal shift associated with civil rights legislation was too intrusive. Such astute analysis characterizes this book, making it essential reading for historians of segregation in the South.

While using a well-established periodization Cooley offers some significant new insights. In the first part of the twentieth century southern white women, influenced by the rise of domestic science and growing racial problems, attempted to connect proper food preparation to white supremacy. In public eating spaces, as lunch counters and other types of public eateries proliferated, policy makers feared that white women and black men might interact in locations beyond elite control. Cooley’s careful research here indicates that racial segregation was part of a long-standing effort to impose order that initially focused on deviations by class and gender. For example, the Atlanta city council sought to keep restaurateurs from offering free food with alcohol sales, assuming the practice encouraged post-dinner interactions among men and women. But there and elsewhere, immigrant proprietors occasionally flouted the custom of maintaining dining rooms for elite white women, and further transgressed by employing white women as waitresses, who might then serve black men. By 1914 cities across the South began banning interracial eating, fearing that it contributed “to racial mixing and thereby challenge[d] racial purity” (p. 65).

Between 1936 and 1959 federal food regulations, public education, and economic expansion brought food sciences into the mainstream and made public eating much more widespread. On the home front, a fad in “Old South” cookbooks allowed white society women to create new historical memory by shoring up images of black women as happily servile cooks and the South as a distinctive region. Meanwhile, fewer people were actually eating at home. The climate and a regional proclivity toward suburbanization and car culture meant that the new fast food industry did very well in the South. But national chains forfeited the chance to bring democratic eating rules to regional franchises by trading on an idealized image of white middle-class families; local customs prevailed, and African American diners found eating while traveling more difficult than ever.

After 1960, segregationists made restaurants a focal point of their massive resistance to the civil rights movement. Cooley’s careful analysis of restaurant proprietors Lester Maddox and Ollie McClung Sr. demonstrates how those men conflated family restaurants with private spaces in which white women could expect protection from black men. Cooley corrects previous interpretations of the repeal of Birmingham’s segregation ordinance in 1963, noting that the city council did so not in a progressive nod toward the inevitable, but rather as a legal strategy. Earlier that year the U.S. Supreme Court had decided that such ordinances were unconstitutional. In rescinding its ordinance, the Birmingham city council hoped that private actions by local restaurateurs who did not advertise or...