Food has been and continues to be an essential part of any movement for progressive change. From home cooks and professional chefs to local eateries and bakeries, food has helped activists continue marching for change for generations. Paschal's restaurant in Atlanta provided safety and comfort food for civil rights leaders. Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam operated their own farms, dairies and bakeries in the 1960s. "The Sandwich Brigade" organized efforts to feed the thousands at the March on Washington. Author Fred Opie details the ways southern food nourished the fight for freedom, along with cherished recipes associated with the era.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. loved the fried catfish and lemon icebox pie at Memphis's Four Way restaurant. Beloved nonagenarian chef Leah Chase introduced George W. Bush to baked cheese grits and scolded Barack Obama for putting Tabasco sauce on her gumbo at New Orleans's Dooky Chase's. When SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael asked Ben's Chili Bowl owners Ben and Virginia Ali to keep the restaurant open during the 1968 Washington, DC, riots, they obliged, feeding police, firefighters, and student activists as they worked together to quell the violence. Celebrated former Chicago Sun-Times columnist Dave Hoekstra unearths these stories and hundreds more as he travels, tastes, and talks his way through twenty of America's best, liveliest, and most historically significant soul food restau­rants. Following the "soul food corridor" from the South through northern industrial cities, The People's Place gives voice to the remarkable chefs, workers, and small business owners (often women) who provided sustenance and a safe haven for civil rights pioneers, not to mention presidents and politicians; music, film, and sports legends; and countless everyday, working-class people. Featuring lush photos, mouth-watering recipes, and ruminations from notable regulars such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, jazz legend Ramsey Lewis, Little Rock Nine member Minnijean Brown, and many others, The People's Place is an unprecedented celebration of soul food, community, and oral history.

In this Bank Street College of Education Best Children's Book of the Year, Paula Young Shelton, daughter of Civil Rights activist Andrew Young, brings a child’s unique perspective to an important chapter in America’s history. Paula grew up in the deep south, in a world where whites had and blacks did not. With an activist father and a community of leaders surrounding her, including Uncle Martin (Martin Luther King), Paula watched and listened to the struggles, eventually joining with her family—and thousands of others—in the historic march from Selma to Montgomery. Poignant, moving, and hopeful, this is an intimate look at the birth of the Civil Rights Movement.

This book explores the changing food culture of the urban American South during the Jim Crow era by examining how race, ethnicity, class, and gender contributed to the development and maintenance of racial segregation in public eating places. Significant legal changes later supported the unprecedented progress of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Widely praised upon publication and now considered a classic study, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights chronicles the southern industrial union movement from the Great Depression to the Cold War, a history that created the context for the sanitation workers' strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in April 1968. Michael K. Honey documents the dramatic labor battles and sometimes heroic activities of workers and organizers that helped to set the stage for segregation's demise. Winner of the Charles S. Sydnor Award, given by the Southern Historical Association, 1994. Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize given by the Organization of American Historians, 1994. Winner of the Herbert G. Gutman Award for an outstanding book in American social history.

“The one food book you must read this year." —Southern Living One of Christopher Kimball’s Six Favorite Books About Food A people’s history that reveals how Southerners shaped American culinary identity and how race relations impacted Southern food culture over six revolutionary decades Like great provincial dishes around the world, potlikker is a salvage food. During the antebellum era, slave owners ate the greens from the pot and set aside the leftover potlikker broth for the enslaved, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich. After slavery, potlikker sustained the working poor, both black and white. In the South of today, potlikker has taken on new meanings as chefs have reclaimed it. Potlikker is a quintessential Southern dish, and The Potlikker Papers is a people’s history of the modern South, told through its food. Beginning with the pivotal role cooks and waiters played in the civil rights movement, noted authority John T. Edge narrates the South’s fitful journey from a hive of racism to a hotbed of American immigration. He shows why working-class Southern food has become a vital driver of contemporary American cuisine. Food access was a battleground issue during the 1950s and 1960s. Ownership of culinary traditions has remained a central contention on the long march toward equality. The Potlikker Papers tracks pivotal moments in Southern history, from the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s to the rise of fast and convenience foods modeled on rural staples. Edge narrates the gentrification that gained traction in the restaurants of the 1980s and the artisanal renaissance that began to reconnect farmers and cooks in the 1990s. He reports as a newer South came into focus in the 2000s and 2010s, enriched by the arrival of immigrants from Mexico to Vietnam and many points in between. Along the way, Edge profiles extraordinary figures in Southern food, including Fannie Lou Hamer, Colonel Sanders, Mahalia Jackson, Edna Lewis, Paul Prudhomme, Craig Claiborne, and Sean Brock. Over the last three generations, wrenching changes have transformed the South. The Potlikker Papers tells the story of that dynamism—and reveals how Southern food has become a shared culinary language for the nation.

This lively, handsomely illustrated, first-of-its-kind book celebrates the food of the American South in all its glorious variety—yesterday, today, at home, on the road, in history. It brings us the story of Southern cooking; a guide for more than 200 restaurants in eleven Southern states; a compilation of more than 150 time-honored Southern foods; a wonderfully useful annotated bibliography of more than 250 Southern cookbooks; and a collection of more than 200 opinionated, funny, nostalgic, or mouth-watering short selections (from George Washington Carver on sweet potatoes to Flannery O’Connor on collard greens). Here, in sum, is the flavor and feel of what it has meant for Southerners, over the generations, to gather at the table—in a book that’s for reading, for cooking, for eating (in or out), for referring to, for browsing in, and, above all, for enjoying.