JH: If you take a look at African Individuals in meals within the nation and past, you’re speaking about one thing that originates in pressured and unpaid labor via slavery that then morphs into underpaid labor that in the end, with the end result of among the Civil Rights Motion, turns into paid labor that’s nonetheless negotiating for parity.
It additionally turns into a ladies’s rights situation. For those who peel the floor again, it’s all the time ladies who’re underpinning social actions. And I believe that that’s demonstrated by the women in our episode in regards to the Civil Rights Motion: the superstar chef Lena Richard, the cookbook writer Edna Lewis, all of these of us who did it, because the saying goes, simply as nicely backwards and in excessive heels.
SS: And it’s not like Black ladies didn’t have their very own cash and their very own enterprises and their very own social teams and modes of resisting and organizing that usually have been overlapping with Black males’s and Black of us’ generally. However I believe lots of what I needed to have fun are the components of that story which are a mode of safety and creating their very own sense of independence. Fascinated about the ways in which Black ladies have used meals to construct wealth and legacies and throw fabulous events, such because the millionaires and socialites Madam C. J. Walker and A’Lelia Walker, it’s exhausting to not fall in love with that a part of the historical past.
BA: The season’s civil rights episode is phenomenal. It focuses partly on the sit-in on the segregated Magnolia tea room in Wealthy’s division retailer in Atlanta. Why did you select to middle meals in that historical past?
SS: To me, the actual story is about enlightened and well-organized younger folks utilizing eating places, the place folks gathered to eat meals, as a goal for civil disruption of well mannered Southern segregated society. Meals plainly isn’t solely a necessity of people, however one thing that actually underscores the absurdity of segregation. It causes indigestion, if you’ll. And, in fact, it didn’t simply begin in Atlanta, the place our episode takes place. However that particular motion, that particular model of resistance, occurred in locations the place meals was served, like on the lunch counter or on the eating places in Wealthy’s division retailer. I believe it is all proper there, why these areas have been so deliberately chosen.
