Foodways

Black Food is a compilation of the experience of the African Diaspora using food as a vehicle. Bryant Terry collects essays, recipes, and artwork from black people around the world. Black Food explores the intersection of food, community, and experience to create a spiritual feast (and a literal one)!

A Hybrid is a collection of poetry by Nikki Giovani that celebrates the joys of everyday life. She explores memories of family and loved ones, of those that are still here and those that have moved on. Food acts as a binding agent for these moments, bringing people together, and flavoring memory if not carrying them outright.

Dreaming Out Loud is a DC-based organization that seeks to rebuild community-based food systems in the predominantly black, urban areas of Washington, DC. DOL also offers entrepreneurship training and workforce development to combat food insecurity and establish financial stability. The organization has created a pipeline from community farming and food distribution to economic opportunity and community wealth with its practices.

On December 1964, a leaflet went out to families in the Roxbury community, reading "DO YOU WANT 27 POUNDS OF FREE FOOD? COME TO A MEETING . . ." Thirty women showed up, and returned in a few days with 1500 signatures on a petition asking for the distribution of surplus food in Boston. Fifty mothers delivered the demand to Mayor Collins, who promised the food by March 1. The mayor failed to deliver.

Oasis: Oldways Africana Soups in Stories is a collection of stories from experts in agriculture, the culinary arts, nutrition, and more compiled alongside recipes and personal vignettes that explore diasporic identity and health using soup as a vessel. The anthology communicates the wide breadth of diasporic recipes and traditions and varied experiences concerning geography, health and wellness, and self-care.

Ezell Blair and Joseph McNeil organized a sit-in protest at the Greensboro Woolworth’s lunch counter along with two other college students. After the students were kicked out they spoke to community leaders around campus and a series of sit-in protests began across North Carolina. Eventually, white students began to join the protests as well. Many of the protests led to the rapid desegregation of some lunch counters but overall helped to increase awareness of the indignity of segregation all over the US.

BPP Free Breakfast and Health Clinics  - can be removed since both exist as independent constellations now

New Community Church of God in Christ (NCCOGIC) located in Waldorf, MD offers annual food pantry services during the holiday seasons--Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The church provides free meals to its predominately Black congregation, providing food security to low-income families.

As discrimination against African Americans was widespread in the 1930s, many establishments refused to cater to African American travelers. They faced inconveniences ranging from denial to food and lodging to arbitrary arrest. It was then that Victor H. Green, an African-American New York City mailman published the Negro Motorist Green Book. It served as a guidebook for African American travelers and provided a list of hotels, restaurants, taverns, service stations, and other establishments throughout the country that served African American patrons. The book was published yearly from 1936-1964 to help increase the safety of African American travelers throughout the United States, before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed multiple types of racial discrimination that had made the Green Book necessary.

The first of the Black Panthers’ community programs, the Free Breakfast Program provided free breakfasts to poor school children in Oakland, CA to encourage health and learning and as an alternative to the statewide School Breakfast and Lunch programs which were limited in reach. Eventually, the Black Panthers’ program grew successful enough that 36 cities had a breakfast program and the administrator of California’s School Lunch Program admitted that it fed more children than the state of California. However, intervention from law enforcement agencies and party infighting led to the dissolution of many Party chapters and the closing of the breakfast programs.