Chicken & Black People
Eating Chicken, especially fried chicken, has long been a stigmatizing experience for black people despite the fact that most omnivores (regardless of their race or ethnicity) love chicken, fried or otherwise.
Despite chicken’s popularity across food cultures, Black people have had to deal with centuries of it being used as a tool of White supremacy to stereotype and discourage us from having any self-determined relationship to the animal. However, Black people’s relationship with chicken extends far beyond Colonel Sanders co-opting fried chicken and European enslavers accusing enslaved Black people of theft. Instead our relationship is irrevocably tied to a legacy rooted in the foodways and resistance strategies of the African diaspora.
Guinea Hen by Mark Stansberry II
Although the chickens we’re most familiar with today originated in Asian and European countries, people of the African diaspora have a connection to birds that traces back to West and Central Africa where the people of those regions have had a native bird all their own. The Helmeted Guinea Hen (or Guinea Fowl) aka Numida Meleagris, is native to countries in the African savannas (e.g. Guinea, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal) where it has been domesticated for thousands of years.
Guinea hens were, and still are, significant in these countries for several dietary and spiritual reasons. They’ve long been used in multiple West African religions to honor deceased relatives and friends, and prepared as an offering to deities. They also had a significant presence in feasts when celebrating loved ones or planting important crops like yams. Igbo and Mande cultures would often have the birds roasted, barbecued, fried, or boiled in a variety of dishes for these occasions. These cooking methods would eventually be carried across the globe by people of the African diaspora.
Image Credit: The Borgen Project. Ghanaian kids barbecuing some guinea hens. 2015.
West African people’s prior experience with guinea hens and other livestock played a role in European enslavers choosing who to capture for trading across the Atlantic. In Psyche Williams-Forson’s book Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs, she details some of the early relationships Black people had with chicken when they were forcibly brought to the Americas and Caribbean during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Although chickens were abundant in the European colonies, they weren’t valued by Europeans in the same way that they valued cattle and pigs. Cattle could be used for field labor, while pigs and other animals were more popular as a source of meat. Although chickens were in the rotation of livestock kept on plantations, they weren’t as prized as birds like geese and ducks. Chickens were viewed as common wild animals that were often left to roam freely, and if they were kept it was for their eggs, and only occasionally slaughtered for their meat.
Image Credit: Library of Congress. Farmer Violet Davenport tending to her chickens in 1940 in Thomastown, Louisiana.
Either way chickens were one of the many animals that enslaved Black people were charged with raising on plantations. As a lower caste food it was often one that they were allowed to raise to supplement their rations alongside tending to vegetables in their subsistence gardens. Due to chickens being so abundant yet undervalued, they were one of the few items that some enslaved Black people, particularly Black women were allowed to sell in local markets. At the markets they could also socialize with other enslaved or free Black people, and have some autonomy from the plantation. This wasn’t the case everywhere, but in some states it was very common.
In areas of the country where enslaved Black people weren’t allowed to raise and grow food to supplement their rations, many were forced to desperate measures such as stealing food, including chickens, from the plantation. In Williams-Forson’s book she points out how the necessity of theft by enslaved or poor Black people is one of the many ways that chicken became a useful tool in stereotyping us.
Image Credit: Library of Congress. Staged photo of a Black boy stealing a chicken. New York : Underwood & Underwood, publishers, c1901.
Stereotyping could, in many ways then be used as a tool of controlling, degrading, and shaming Black people’s foodways. Although not all Black people stole, most White people (enslavers or not) knew that because of the conditions of White supremacy many Black people would need to steal, thus creating a narrative for discrimination against them.
Chicken is all tied up in this. However, despite these stereotypes, historians like Williams-Forson, Frederick Douglass Opie, and many others, highlight in their works how Black people have continued to create a culture around chicken that is unstoppable and powerful. After all, Black people inherited a connection to birds like chicken from their African roots. Those roots would serve as the reference for chicken being used as means to advance economic opportunities and human rights for Black folks.
Image Credit: Town of Gordonsville (although technically I stole it this from an NPR article, but either way it inspired the header image)
Chicken would show up on the menus of Southern eateries that fed Black communities during segregation and Jim Crow laws.
It would travel as a source of comfort for families making The Great Migration.
Chicken would be the focal food item sold by the Gordonsville waiters along railroads in Virginia (seen above), with income from their sales going towards paying for homes and education for their families.
It would be prepared along with biscuits and pies by women like Georgia Gilmore during the Civil Rights Era to support protesting efforts such as the Montgomery Bus Boycotts in Alabama.
And renowned gospel singer Mahalia Jackson would start a fried chicken franchise as a means of creating robust economic opportunities for Black people (e.g. including paid time-off and health care in their employee packages).
These are just a few of the examples of Black people historically, whether intentionally or not, creating a more complete narrative of their relationship to chicken.
Screenshot from Georgia Gilmore interview (here) about The Club From Nowhere funding the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
All that to say that while chicken has been a violent tool of White supremacy used by White and non-Black people, often encouraging a disconnection from our food, these are distractions from our complexity and inheritance. Instead these stories go to show that Black folks have included chicken as one of many tools of uplift and cultural innovation throughout time, and continue to. Our relationship to chicken (and other animals) is therefore something really special and to be celebrated, not mocked and distorted.
A young girl risking stereotypes by eating fried chicken in public, with no fork!! (2019) Image Credit: Asia H.
Learn more about Chicken (especially Fried Chicken) and Black people with these books and articles:
Black Authors in Bold
White Authors in Basic
Building Houses Out Of Chicken Legs by Psyche Williams-Forson
Hog and Hominy: Soul Food From Africa to America by Frederick Douglass Opie
In the Shadow of Slavery by Judith Carney and Nicholas Rosomoff
Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate at a Time by Adrian Miller
How Gordonsville, Virginia, Became the “Fried Chicken Capital of the World” by Lauren Ober
TL;DR
Mahalia Jackson Glori-fried Chicken: SFWA Gravy Podcast (HERE)
Illustrations by Mark Stansberry II