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Southern Cultures 11.2 (2005) 93-97


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Remembering Harry Golden

Food, Race, and Laughter

Tom Hanchett


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Harry Golden aimed his new newspaper at anyone who might listen. He wrote about whatever was on his mind; Kathleen Purvis of the Charlotte Observer recently called him "the world's first blogger." Photograph courtesy of Special Collections, Atkins Library, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
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The 2004 meeting of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture brought together more than 300 scholars, food writers, restaurateurs, and just plain food lovers to eat and talk about issues of race and food history. Tom Hanchett, historian at the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina, shared this profile of 1950s southern writer Harry Golden, who used food and humor to advance the nascent Civil Rights movement.

Imagine a Jewish guy, short, fat, maybe in his fifties, bald, smoking a big cigar, Hungarian immigrants' kid, Yiddish accent, very Lower East Side. Make him a reporter for a labor union newspaper. That's Harry Golden. Now move him from New York, his natural habitat, to Charlotte, North Carolina. Cotton-mill town, banking town, place where religious diversity means Baptists and Presbyterians, adamantly antiunion dating back to the General Textile Strike of 1934, when labor was rounded up and put in barbed-wire concentration camps. That's incongruous, right? Well, Harry Golden loved incongruous. He delighted in this new region he found himself in, and he delighted in the role of gadfly and kibitzer.


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Golden made friends in the black community, and a marvelous strain of satirical humor bubbled into the Carolina Israelite: "I prevailed upon the manager of a department store to shut off the water in his 'white' fountain and put up an 'out of order' sign. . . . By the end of the third week, everybody was drinking 'colored' water without a single, solitary complaint." Dr. Martin Luther King (center) and Harry Golden (right), from the James Peeler Family Collection, courtesy of the Levine Museum of the New South.
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Harry Golden came to Charlotte at the tail end of the Great Depression and found himself a job at a little labor union newspaper. It's a surprise, perhaps, but there were enough unionists in Charlotte to support a newspaper—at least for a little while. Golden was energetic, a good ad salesman, a good talker, good company. Folks gravitated to him, enjoyed his presence and his stories. When the newspaper went belly-up, Harry Golden decided to start his own monthly sheet, a one-man show called the Carolina Israelite. I told you he celebrated the incongruous. Actually, if you know the South it may not surprise you that Charlotte had enough Jews to support Leo's Delicatessen, and Harry opened the Carolina Israelite in a big old Victorian house just a few steps from that nourishment.

Harry aimed his new newspaper not specifically at Jews, but at anyone who might listen. He wrote about whatever was on his mind; Kathleen Purvis of the Charlotte Observer recently called him "the world's first blogger." It might be his Lower East Side youth, his thoughts on news of the day, his love of opera, his love of food. It always, somehow, was about community. "I have a positive cure for this mental aberration called anti-Semitism. I believe we've been doing it all wrong. I believe that if we gave each anti-Semite an onion roll with lox and cream cheese, some chopped chicken liver with a nice radish, and a good piece of brisket of beef with a few potato pancakes, he'd soon give up all this nonsense. It is worth a try." Or the time he gave a box of genuine halva candy from New York to a "Gentile friend here who had been courting a widow lady for years without success . . . and the next time I saw the guy he was dancing in the streets...

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