Section 5 · Regions
Six regional expressions of Black American cuisine. Tap a pin on the map to open the region, or scroll the cards below.
Each pin opens a regional record. The food traveled with the people, carried North and West by the Great Migration.
Coastal South Carolina and Georgia
This is the clearest, most intact line of West African foodways anywhere in the United States. The Gullah Geechee people, descendants of Africans brought to the rice coast to grow a crop most white enslavers did not know how to grow, built a culture that held.
Alabama, Mississippi, inland Georgia
When people say 'soul food,' this is most often what they mean. The inland Deep South is where field peas, collards, mustard and turnip greens, cornbread, pork, and slow-cooked everything became the grammar of the Black American table.
New Orleans and the Gulf
Louisiana is a convergence: West African, Caribbean, French, Spanish, and Indigenous Choctaw and Houma traditions meeting in a place that refused to choose. What came out of that collision is one of the most technically demanding cuisines on the continent.
Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky
This is Edna Lewis country. The Upper South is where the garden, the smokehouse, and the cellar do the teaching. It is quieter food than the Deep South, more restrained, more pointed, more tied to the turning of the season.
Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia
Between 1910 and 1970, six million Black Americans left the South. They brought their kitchens with them. Southern food did not stay Southern. It became Chicago rib tips and hot links, Detroit coneys reimagined, Harlem fried chicken and waffles, Philly's catfish and grits.
Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle
The Second Great Migration and the military-industrial pull of World War II moved Black Americans west. Louisiana and East Texas went to Oakland and South Central. Mississippi and Arkansas went to Seattle and Portland. The food went with them, and it kept moving.