The Larder: Food Studies Methods from the American South

CHAPTER 11 “The Customer Is Always White”: Food, Race, and Contested Eating Space in the South

CHAPTER 11 ▶ “The Customer Is Always White” Food, Race, and Contested Eating Space in the South angela jill cooley In 1964 Ollie’s Barbecue sat at the intersection of Ninth Street and Seventh Avenue South in Birmingham, Alabama. Ollie’s was a white-owned restaurant that offered table seating to white-collar businessmen and white families. Barbecue, nonalcoholic beverages, and homemade pies made up the majority of the restaurant’s sales. After almost forty years in business, the restaurant had been passed down through three generations of the McClung family. The current proprietors, Ollie McClung Sr. and his son, professed to run a business guided by their religious and family-oriented principles. They did not serve alcohol, they did not open on Sundays, and they placed a sign on every table that read, “No profanity please. Ladies and children are usually present. We appreciate your cooperation.” On the restaurant’s walls, the McClungs displayed religious verses and a picture of Barry Goldwater. The McClungs considered most of their white customers to be“regulars” and recognized them by face if not by name. Although Ollie’s Barbecue catered to a white customer base, it was located in an African American neighborhood and served black customers takeout at the end of the service counter. Until 1963 the Birmingham City Code required the racial segregation of eating places.After the city repealed this law,Ollie’s still refused to seat African Americans.In fact,Ollie’s continued to refuse service to African Americans in the dining room even after the U.S. Congress required restaurant desegregation. The McClungs made legal history by unsuccessfully challenging the constitutionality of the federal law in court. This action and similar suits brought by other white southern restaurateurs represented the culmination of around four years of direct “The Customer Is Always White” 241 action struggle to desegregate southern eating space since the Greensboro sit-ins started in February 1960. The civil rights movement exposed the contested nature of public eating space in the South as activists and white supremacists vied to have their interpretation of the appropriate use of southern space respected and accepted . Civil rights activists challenged the inferior status of African Americans in southern consumer culture as well as the representation of blacks as subservient in public spaces and images devoted to the preparation, consumption , and service of food. For their part, white supremacists identified direct action protests in eating places as a threat to the carefully constructed images of blackness as servile and inferior that white Americans had spent generations cultivating. Both sides of the highly publicized civil rights campaigns to desegregate public eating places recognized the intimate associations that existed among food, consumption, race, body, and identity. They also comprehended the necessary and pervasive nature of food and the ramifications that desegregated eating space might have for other aspects of society, both public and private. Although the struggle for civil rights epitomized the concept of public eating places as contested space in the southern urban environment, the movement only made evident a process that had been taking place for many decades.The development of public eating spaces starting in the early twentieth century reveals an increasingly urban and mobile South attempting to accommodate more concentrated, diverse populations and an increasingly consumption-oriented culture. The leisure experience of dining out, which at one time had been limited primarily to a privileged elite feasting in carefully prescribed environments, gave way to a more motley assortment of lower-class establishments that hosted assorted crowds who ate out for necessity, convenience, or entertainment and often partook of a variety of less wholesome activities of urban indulgence. Scholars have offered little analysis of the development of southern eating places, the role such spaces played in the development of consumer culture, or the effect of such establishments on the construction of racial, class, ethnic, and gender identities . This essay is intended to uncover the genesis of civil rights conflicts in public eating places by exploring the contested nature of these consumer spaces in the early twentieth century. 242 Angela Jill Cooley Decades before the sit-ins and desegregation court cases, public eating places in southern urban areas reflected the broader cultural conflicts among middle-class white authorities and various lower-class elements, each attempting to mold public urban space to meet their own desires, needs, and anxieties. Public eating establishments...