Section 6 · Figures
Who Built This
Not a hall of fame. A living bibliography of the people whose work makes this framework possible. Photographs and primary archives are being added as the project grows.
Archivers & historians
Archivers & historians
Toni Tipton-Martin
Toni Tipton-Martin is the reason we can say, with evidence, that Black Americans have been authoring their own cookbooks for more than two centuries. Her work The Jemima Code, a curated archive of 150+ Black-authored cookbooks going back to 1827, permanently refuted the idea that the Black Southern kitchen was illiterate or anonymous.
Read the entry →Archivers & historians
Jessica B. Harris
Dr. Jessica B. Harris is the preeminent scholar of the African diaspora's foodways. Her twelve books, most famously High on the Hog, trace the line from West African kitchens through the Atlantic and into every corner of the Americas.
Read the entry →Archivers & historians
Michael W. Twitty
Michael W. Twitty is a culinary historian, cook, and living interpreter whose work The Cooking Gene braids genealogy, archival research, and plantation-era cookery into the most personally urgent account of Black Southern food we have.
Read the entry →Archivers & historians
Adrian Miller
Adrian Miller, the 'Soul Food Scholar,' is the historian of record for both soul food as a category and Black barbecue as a lineage. Soul Food and Black Smoke are the two books that together make the American barbecue story an accurate one.
Read the entry →Archivers & historians
Psyche Williams-Forson
Dr. Psyche Williams-Forson, chair of American Studies at the University of Maryland, has done the essential work of refusing the caricature. Her Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs turned one of the most abused racial stereotypes into a careful study of Black women's economic, cultural, and culinary power.
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Donna Battle Pierce
Donna Battle Pierce is the journalist and archivist who has kept the Freda DeKnight / Ebony Magazine tradition of Black food writing alive. Her Skillet Diaries column and her ongoing archival work on Black women cookbook authors fills in a record the mainstream food press forgot to keep.
Read the entry →Chefs who expanded the canon
Chefs who expanded the canon
Edna Lewis
Miss Lewis taught America that Black Southern cooking was a cuisine in the full sense, seasonal, disciplined, articulated, written down. The Taste of Country Cooking, organized by the year in Freetown, Virginia, is one of the most important cookbooks ever published in this country.
Read the entry →Chefs who expanded the canon
Leah Chase
Leah Chase ran Dooky Chase's in New Orleans for over sixty years. She fed the Freedom Riders in a room where interracial meetings were illegal. She fed Ray Charles, James Baldwin, the Obamas, and the neighborhood. She elevated Creole cooking into a serious, written, teachable cuisine.
Read the entry →Chefs who expanded the canon
Mashama Bailey
Mashama Bailey, chef of The Grey in Savannah, is one of the clearest contemporary interpreters of the Lowcountry tradition. Her James Beard Outstanding Chef award (2022) is less important than the way her menus argue that this food is already fine dining, and always has been.
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Bryant Terry
Bryant Terry is the chef, activist, and editor-in-chief of 4 Color Books who has, more than anyone, expanded Black American cooking into plant-forward, globally diasporic, politically grounded territory. Vegetable Kingdom and Black Food (which he edited) are foundational.
Read the entry →Agricultural innovators
Agricultural innovators
George Washington Carver
George Washington Carver is typically reduced to 'the peanut man' in grade-school textbooks. That reduction hides the real contribution: a systematic, research-based approach to crop rotation, soil regeneration, and yield diversification built for Black farmers working the worn-out land of the post-Reconstruction South.
Read the entry →Agricultural innovators
Fannie Lou Hamer
Fannie Lou Hamer is remembered as a civil rights organizer. She was also the founder of Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County, Mississippi, a 680-acre cooperative that fed, housed, and sustained Black families in the Delta during some of the hardest years of the movement.
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