[jazz music playing]
[Stephen] Atlanta, Georgia.
I grew up here.
It's the place where I first fell in love with food.
Food that has an incredibly deep connection
to the Civil Rights Movement.
It was food that both mobilized and funded the movement.
I'm back home to meet three former student activists
who planned and executed a galvanizing civil rights operation
in order to desegregate restaurants,
and allow Black Americans to dine with dignity.
[jazz music ends]
[theme song playing]
[jazz music playing]
[Stephen] My city still echoes the cause of the Civil Rights Movement.
This is a place where demonstrations and political strategy work
overflowed from every street corner,
especially the protests directed by Black students
ushering in a new style of activism.
[man] During the early weeks of 1960,
the demonstrations that came to be called
the "sit-in movement" exploded across the South.
[Stephen] College students across campuses like Morehouse and Spelman
organized numerous sit-ins and effectively dismantled
a Jim Crow segregated system
that prevented African Americans from being served in public spaces.
Decades later, these former student activists,
Dr. Georgianne Thomas, Marilyn Pryce Hoytt,
and Charles Black are reunited at Paschal's,
a Black-owned restaurant that provided these activists support in the '60s.
[Stephen] I am extremely honored
to be here with you all at Paschal's.
It's really important to me that we speak your names today
and give you all an opportunity
to uplift the names of others who are not here.
And Mr. Black, I see you have… You're a Morehouse man.
They wouldn't let me in Spelman because some kind of gender bias there.
[laugh]
[Black] So I had to go to Morehouse.
So, yeah, talk to us about y'all's original initial connection.
Well, the Atlanta University Center
was, at that time, the largest concentration
of higher education for Blacks in the country.
And for the very first time,
students came together as one to effect change
and the cooperation among all of us
led to an effective boycott and picketing in all of downtown Atlanta.
[Stephen] This is the early '60s.
This is a time of mobilization.
Dr. Karcheik, who is an amazing scholar
and historian of all things Black Atlanta and civil rights,
why don't you give us a little context?
When you look at
the history of African Americans and their quest for freedom,
they're actually part of this long civil rights narrative,
dating all the way back to Reconstruction.
As you all are organizing in the Atlanta University Center,
what happens is that it ignites a fire,
and your generation wanted to destroy Jim Crow.
-[Marilyn] Yes. -[Georgianne] Yes.
[Black] My generation was pissed off from birth.
My parents were the generation
that Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation."
[sad music playing]
[Black] It was that generation that was conscripted in the military
to go overseas
to fight and make the world safe for democracy,
only to come back and be called "niggers."
And to be abused and insulted while wearing their uniforms,
even some lynched while wearing their uniforms.
We knew all that stuff wasn't right,
so, uh, we were prepared for the action that we took.
Radicalized.
-Born radicalized, basically, you know. -[Stephen] That's right.
[Stephen] Still teenagers, these activists put their bodies on the line
and took on the task to desegregate restaurants and other public spaces,
leading up to a little-known,
but extremely impactful, civil rights operation.
We were 16, 17, 18.
And I had just turned 19.
The leaders came and spoke to us and said,
"You must fight. You must March."
I was the first one because I couldn't eat a hot dog.
What do you mean? You gotta go to a back door to get a hot dog?
I'm from Gary, Indiana.
I didn't have any idea what it meant to come to school in the South.
And so, on October 19th, we got up and followed these people.
And we walked out of Spelman College,
and we met up with the Morehouse men
and the Atlanta University students.
It took something for me
because my mother had told me, "You'd better not do it."
She was so angry with me. She said,
"I sent you to Spelman to get an education,
and you down there… What are you down there doing?"
But I couldn't stop myself.
[upbeat music playing]
[Black] On October 19th, we focused on Rich's department store,
and for good reason. We knew that if Rich's fell,
everybody else would fall
because Rich's was everybody's favorite store.
[Marilyn] We grew up going to Rich's. There was the Magnolia Tea Room.
And it was just a restaurant, but to us…
-[Black] White tablecloths. -…it was magnificent.
-White tablecloths, china, silverware. -[Black] Yeah, silverware. That's right.
[Marilyn] But we never went there. We went down to the basement,
-where there was a little snack bar. -[Georgianne] Mm-hmm.
[Marilyn] It was not a restaurant for the colored.
And so that made it even more personal to us.
And so I was ready.
And then these organizers,
they explained to us what the sit-in was going to be about.
And they told us,
"If you are prepared to go to jail for six months,
go to the right side of the room."
Two of my roommates and myself,
we automatically went. We didn't think about it. We knew.
On the morning of the 19th,
leaders told us, "Go back to the dorm,
pack your bag, have your books ready."
"We will pick them up and bring them to you at the jail."
What time did it start? I don't remember the time.
It was in the morning. And we assembled in front
-of Trevor Arnett Library at AU Center. -Yes.
[Marilyn] We held hands and prayed.
-Yes. -We sang songs.
And one of them was,
"Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around."
That was the spirit.
-We had that spirit. -Yes.
And "I woke up this morning with my mind,"
at first, we would say, "stayed on Jesus," right?
But the next line, "I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom."
I knew that God was with us
and that all that had been in my background,
my parents, my grandparents, and ancestors
was there on that day with me.
The experiences that you all had,
these are not histories that can be understood
by even reading a textbook.
And I feel that presence and the historical significance
being with you all here. I would love to know
about the actual event itself,
and what happened to you,
what you remember,
what you tried to forget.
I remember on October 19th,
we had to walk up the hill onto Rich's
and the Klan was waiting for us.
I was like, "Oh my God, what's gonna happen to me?"
[speaks angrily] I'm 17 years old!
These people got on white robes.
They spat on us.
You'd feel people spitting on you and calling you "nigger."
Here I am, a child and, you know, walking with my little placard,
thinking about, "My mother's gonna kill me,
but I'mma do it anyway."
And this man jumped out of the crowd.
He puts a cigarette mark on my arm.
-Right here. -[Karcheik] Oh my good Lord.
And burns me.
And I'm standing there like, "My mother gonna kill me for real now."
You'd think I'd be feeling it.
I'm thinking about, "How am I going to tell my mother?"
-[Karcheik] Did he put his hands on you? -That he put a cigarette on me.
How am I gonna tell my mother how I got burned?
And on that day I thought, I said, "I'm doing this. I don't care."
And when I saw the Klan, I'm telling you, that did something to me.
When he burned me, that did something to me. But it didn't stop me.
[Stephen] As student activists were protesting
and making public spaces their headquarters,
religious groups and houses of worship provided sanctuary.
Like the mosques where Black Muslims and members of the Nation of Islam
nourish their community through the growing, selling,
and making of their own food.
-[Zaheer] Let's take our shoes off. -Okay.
[Stephen] Zaheer Ali is a historian
whose work centers Islam in America
and African American history.
In other words, just the right person to sit with
to further understand the role of Black Muslims
in the Civil Rights Movement.
-Al right, Brother Zaheer. -Yes.
Here in Atlanta, a lot of the ways
in which we understand our Black liberation
is through mostly Christianity.
I wonder if that becomes, in a sense,
the prevailing narrative.
I think when people think about Black liberation and Black movement
and Black religiosity in America,
it's largely through a Christian lens
because of the undeniable power of the Black church.
But when we look at the role of Muslims
during the Civil Rights Movement
as part of the broader Black freedom struggle,
we're talking primarily about the Nation of Islam,
which radically affirmed Blackness
in all of its ways and called out white supremacy.
Free the Black people. Every Black man, woman, and child.
By the mid-'70s, that community began to evolve
towards more classical, traditional expression of Sunni Islam.
And the Masjid that we are in is part of that movement.
[Stephen] The Black Muslim community is a vibrant part of Atlanta culture,
and this mosque is one of the many places
you can find an authentic bean pie.
A sweet custard pie
made from navy beans, sugar, and spices
in a combination that many Muslim families
hold secret to this day.
[indistinct chatting]
Can you give us an origin story
and talk about the cultural significance of the bean pie?
So the bean pie
is the creation of the Nation of Islam.
[newsreader] In the drive to be self-sufficient,
the Nation attempts to provide for basic needs.
Their supermarket chain encourages the Black community
to buy their food supply there,
especially Muslim products that come from Muslim farms,
like beef, bread, and of course, the famous Muslim bean pie.
[Zaheer] The bean pie is a signifier
of autonomy and sovereignty, and an independent identity,
and seeking something that was as free as possible
from the legacy of slavery.
And the bean pie is in conversation with the sweet potato pie.
-[Stephen] Okay. -Right?
It doesn't taste exactly the same,
but it has some of the same spices and flavors.
And the sweet potato pie
was seen as a legacy of the slave diet.
And so, to move completely away from that
but still wanting a dessert that was tasty,
uh, there emerged the bean pie.
There has been a great deal of intention
around keeping the recipe in community.
Yeah, this pie is something
that you have to come into the community to find.
-You have to know some Muslims… -Mm-hmm.
…in order to get the original recipe flavor.
Yeah. We are having conversations
around cultural appropriation in food more broadly,
but this was kind of forward-looking
with the bean pie saying, "Actually, we're gonna keep this close."
I talked to this one elder who said,
"This was our miracle."
Right? Like, this was one of our gifts,
and that is not something
that can be taken and that…
There have been attempts
to, uh, colonize the bean pie,
but, umm, they just don't have
the same flavor profile. They don't have the same texture,
but most importantly,
-they don't have the community. -Right.
[chanting]
-[Malikah] Salam alaykum. -Alaykum salam.
[Zaheer] So we are ready to sample your pies.
I… I can't wait.
-[Stephen] MJ. -[Malikah] MJ. Yes.
[Stephen] Malikah Jordan, who grew up working in her family's Brooklyn bakery,
is now a staple in this community because of her authentic bean pies.
Okay.
[Zaheer] I have eaten quite a few.
-I do see that. -[Zaheer laughs]
[Malikah] Yes.
[Stephen] I have memories of my dad bringing home the bean pies.
And he used to work for a family,
uh, that had a bunch of seafood restaurants here in Atlanta.
-Yes. -Yasin's.
-[Malikah] Oh Yasin's! -You… I saw your eyes get wide.
I just love that in my own household,
where we grew up in a Christian church,
I also grew up with bean pies on my counter
because my daddy knew what was good.
[Malikah] That's right.
And he got put on from his people at Yasin's.
Listen.
It's just been really enlightening for me
to see the ways in which our Black American
and Black Muslim identities and our food
have been adjacent and alongside each other all the time.
[Zaheer] Yeah, it's kind of a food ministry.
Maybe someone who's Muslim
might not dine at a table
where pork chops are served, or chitlins are served,
but a bean pie might be present at that table for dessert.
Right.
[Zaheer] So there's a way that Black Muslims are showing up,
if not in person, in food.
[Stephen] Yeah.
Mmm. Yes. I love seeing my customers enjoy the pie.
See, this is how I know you're a real one,
because the joy that you feel
watching other people eat your food.
-Yes. -That's how I know you care.
I put it into that pie. I hope you taste it.
I do. And I see it too. I appreciate the love.
[Malikah] Awesome.
What is the lineage of your recipe?
My lineage is three generations.
It dates back to my grandmother.
And her and my grandfather owned two bakeries in Brooklyn, New York.
And I was always at her side in the kitchen
while she was making the bean pie mix.
[Zaheer] Do you know where your grandmother
-got her recipe from that you inherited? -[Malikah] Yes.
She came through the Nation of Islam. They put your bean pie to the test.
There was a bar.
[Malikah] There was.
It has to be legit.
And actually, in this mosque, they tasted the pie and said,
"Okay, you can set up camp. You can sell to the community."
So you had to get your pies approved before you could start selling here?
Yes. That was major, like, a major welcoming for me,
and really established me in the community…
-[Stephen] Yeah. -…as the bean pie sister.
[Stephen] Black-owned businesses and restaurants alike
rose to the occasion to protect and nourish
the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement.
Restaurants like Busy Bee,
Frazier's Cafe Society, and Paschal's,
owned and named after brothers James and Robert Paschal,
stood in solidarity with student activists
fighting to end Jim Crow.
Eighty-two-year-old Mr. Eby Slack
has worked at Paschal's restaurant since he was a kid.
He was a waiter
and served student activists when they were released from jail.
[Stephen] So, Mr. Slack, you, as we hear, are a legend.
So tell us about where we are. Tell us who you are.
You know, I grew up in the projects,
and, um, I stayed in trouble a lot. [chuckles]
So my mother and father,
they introduced me to the Paschal brothers,
and they kept me busy doing little one-off things.
And as time went on, you know, I got to be real close to the family.
One day, Martin Luther King Jr. said,
"I need some help from you and your brother if you can help us."
And Mr. Paschal said, "What can we do?"
He said, "Well, I need a place to meet."
Mr. Paschal said, "Well, my brother and I have a hotel suite upstairs."
"Feel free to meet there as long, as many times as you want."
"I only ask you one thing. One big question."
Dr. King says, "Well, what is that?" "That y'all eat my fried chicken."
-[Black] Yeah. -[all laugh]
The food is so ingrained in the story
because the food is what actually provided us
with the economic resources and with the physical space
to actually be able to come together and do the strategy work.
[James] Many, many times Dr. King would regroup his people here.
A lot of the decisions
were made here at Paschal's.
[Stephen] All across the country, the Civil Rights Movement was being fed
by chefs and bakers who met the moment,
not just by feeding the movement but by funding it,
like chef turned activist Georgia Gilmore.
I had always asked the Lord if it would ever become possible for me
to be able to just go around
and not have to worry about going in the back door
or getting up and giving somebody else my seat.
Then I would always thank the Lord because I knew he would answer my prayer.
And he did.
I just think Georgia Gilmore
is one of those hidden treasures
that made such a difference in the Civil Rights movement.
[Stephen] For James Beard semi-finalist baker Cheryl Day,
it's an honor to uplift the legacy of activism
from these Black Southern bakers.
In 1955, after Rosa Parks famously got arrested
for not giving up her seat to a white man,
Montgomery, Alabama civil rights leaders
decided to force the integration of the bus system
by organizing a boycott
that would ultimately last 381 days.
But if they couldn't use the bus, how would Black people get to work?
The answer was a fleet of cars driven by volunteers.
But how do you pay for that?
Georgia Gilmore had the solution.
She created this secret underground kitchen
that she called "the Club from Nowhere"
because this network of bakers and cooks
that were baking to fund the boycott
had to be kept secret.
But when people would ask her, "Well, where's all this food coming from?"
And she would just say, "It's from nowhere." [laughs]
She realized the power that she had
was to make and sell cakes and pies.
She could feed and fuel the Civil Rights Movement.
Can you give us a bit more specifics around exactly how she was doing this?
Basically, she created
an alternative route for people to get to work.
I mean, she created a whole system.
This paid for gas, it paid for insurance, just anything.
She wanted to make sure that we could still get to work
to make a living without having to get on that bus.
Right. We know that Georgia Gilmore
is using pastry
as a way to fund the movement,
but where are people actually
buying the pies and the cakes?
In all of our safe spaces.
Hair salons, barbershops.
You know, where… Churches. Wherever we gathered.
Those safe spaces would have had to be
-the kinds of businesses… -Mm-hmm.
…that had Black American entrepreneurs.
Think about it. You're getting your hair done, and you're sitting there.
How many times have you been sold something at the barbershop?
Countless.
In fact, there's a barbershop across the street from the bakery.
And when we first moved to that location,
I wanted to let them know that I'm here
to be a source of pride in this neighborhood.
So I would start to bring biscuits, pies, cakes.
And once I got the approval from the barbershop,
my business was rolling. [laughs]
-It was on. -[Cheryl] It was on.
[Stephen] Cheryl Day stands in a long line of Black women
who have defined Southern baking.
And she preserves the traditions,
techniques, and stories of these unsung heroes
to this day.
My story goes back to my enslaved great-great-grandmother,
Hannah Queen Grubbs,
who had the position of being a pastry cook.
She made these small, delicate cakes
frosted in these tinted pastel colors.
[Stephen] Baking is in your DNA.
[Cheryl] Yeah. I like to think of it that way too.
And you are really
part of this Georgia Gilmore tradition,
selling directly into Black businesses.
Do you see your work as part of this legacy today?
[Cheryl] I do.
I am in a group of a new generation of bakers
honoring Georgia Gilmore.
And when there's social change,
we rise to the occasion, and we bake to raise money
for things that are important to us.
This is actually a slab pie.
When you're talking about raising money for change
and feeding the Civil Rights Movement,
-it's made in a big half-sheet pan… -Mm-hmm.
…and you're gonna be able to sell a lot of this pie.
So it's fresh Georgia local peaches
and lemon verbena.
Oh, this is gonna be good.
Mmm.
It's good, right? Mmm.
Wow.
Georgia peaches.
This is super good.
-Mission accomplished. [chuckles] -Mmm.
[indistinct chatting]
[Stephen] The front lines of the movement can't exist without everyday workers,
the cooks, the maids, the beauticians, and barbers of the time,
that clearly all played a part.
[man] See the day of Uncle Tom? Uncle Tom is dead.
He just hasn't been buried. But he's dead now, see. [laughs]
-He's dead, see? -[man 2] Well, he's gone.
[Stephen] Support from one Black person to another
keeps Black dollars within our community
so we can fund our movements.
This exchange of hands also supported foot soldiers
like Charles Black, Dr. Georgianne Thomas,
and Marilyn Pryce Hoytt fighting on the front lines
when they marched on October 19, 1960,
to Rich's department store.
The Civil Rights Movement was cross-generational,
and the solidarity that existed amongst Black folks,
regardless of their social status, regardless of where they lived,
people had this shared oppression.
Everybody is contributing in different ways.
Norris Herndon, who is the president of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company,
the wealthiest Black man in the United States, at this time,
he gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to the movement
in order to bail students out.
[Black] It was understood in the beginning, before you're going out
to sit in or picket or whatever
if you were prepared to be arrested.
You can say you were given the opportunity to leave.
So everybody understood that going in.
So you were organizing based on the risk profile of everyone.
Our planning was, you know, that serious
and that minute and that detailed
because it was important that people understood
what they were facing and what risks they were taking.
When October 19th came along,
uh, our movement had been going on,
our sit-ins and work had been going on since March of that year,
and we were losing some steam.
And Lonnie King was our founding chairman of our movement,
who convinced Martin King Jr.
to get arrested at Rich's department store
in the Magnolia Tea Room. Dr. King agreed to do that
only if there were some pretty ladies getting arrested with him.
[Marilyn] Don't tell that part. [laughs]
[Black] That's why Marilyn Pryce was in that picture.
She was one of the pretty ladies that Lonnie found
to get arrested with Martin King on October 19th.
[Georgianne] And Blondean.
[Black] Blondean. Blondean was the other.
There's a picture with Blondean and Martin in the backseat of the police car.
And we went into Rich's.
We got on the elevator and rode up to the sixth floor
to sit in at the Magnolia Tea Room.
And the manager came and said, "What do y'all want?"
And we said, "We just want to sit down and have a meal."
And so, the manager said, "Well, I'm gonna have to call the police."
And so, my roommate and I were escorted
with Reverend King and Lonnie King and a policeman
who walked us from the front doors
of Rich's department store to a police car.
[Georgianne] Okay.
[Marilyn] So we went first, I think, to the city jail.
And we had our mugshots, and we had our fingerprints taken,
but from the city, they took us to Fulton County Jail,
and we had our one phone call.
So I called my father, and I told him,
"Dad, guess what? I'm in jail."
He said, "Okay, let me give the phone to your mother."
Whoa, that's when my heart dropped.
Fortunately, on October 20th, the day after the sit-in,
they opened their newspapers, and there was Marilyn Pryce
-on the front page. -[Georgianne] Oh, yes.
[Marilyn] And so my mother became very proud of the fact
-that her daughter was in the newspaper. -[Georgianne] Yes, yes, yes.
[Marilyn] And if you look at that iconic photograph,
you will see in my eyes there was no fear.
There was determination.
It was like I had been born for that day and that moment.
-Yes. October 19th 1960. -[Marilyn] That was the spirit we took.
When King was arrested,
after he'd been in prison for, like, nine days or so,
Bobby Kennedy convinced John F. Kennedy
to allow Bobby Kennedy to make a call to the judge,
which resulted in Martin being released.
When that happened, the Kennedy campaign published
what was called "the Blue Bomb,"
and it was a flyer that spelled out all the situation,
that was distributed in every major city that had large Black populations.
And as a result of this action,
a lot of Black folk who were still voting Republican
switched to vote Democratic for the first time.
[Georgianne] For the first time.
Leading to Kennedy being elected by less than one vote per precinct
over Nixon, who was leading two weeks earlier.
[Georgianne] Negroes put him in. That's what the headlines said.
[Black] So October 19th in Atlanta helped elect John F. Kennedy.
[Georgianne] Yes. Absolutely.
I'm listening to you say this, and I'm thinking,
"Y'all were so young and you had so much power."
Do you think that the organizing was the source of the power?
You know, one of the things that characterized our movement
at the time that I'm proudest of, it was a selfless movement.
That's why people were prepared to support us,
which is what made our success.
And Paschal's restaurant was very special
because whenever we were in jail,
and we came out late at night,
Paschal would hold the restaurant open
and have some fried chicken and potato salad
and sweet tea for us when we got out of jail.
I want to borrow from the words of the great Ella Baker
when she said that this movement is about more than just a hamburger.
[Georgianne] Um-hmm.
[Karcheik] This was about our civil and human rights.
And today, this movement is
-still about our civil and human rights. -[Georgianne] Mm-hmm.
And I wanna be able to thank you
for so many decades of creating the space
for people to be able to organize mass meetings
in a restaurant where people can celebrate milestones.
Most importantly, be able to dine with dignity.
For me growing up here in Atlanta,
I have inherited all of your legacies,
and I wonder if we can actually ever live up
to the legacies that y'all have created.
But I can tell you that on a personal level,
I am gonna walk away from this day… changed
and more committed to a path and legacy
of Black liberation than I have been even to this point.
I've spoken to a lot of young people over the years,
and I have a good feeling about
the succeeding generations, to be honest,
because I see more and more people lighting their own torch.
[Georgianne] Yes.
I think it's important that you take this forward
so that somebody that's 16 or 17 or 15
will know it's okay to do something different.
[Marilyn] Let us bow our heads.
Lord, we come to you this evening
after sharing our stories,
talking about the history of what we were blessed to do in your name
back in the '50s and the '60s,
so that present and future generations will benefit.
And so, Lord, we ask that you continue to bless us
as we journey along this highway of life.
In Jesus's name, we pray, amen.
[Georgianne] Amen.
[Black] Amen. Amen.
I'm gonna taste this fish.
Yes.
-[Georgianne] Where's the hot sauce? -[Marilyn] Yes.
[laughs]
[Stephen] Because of the efforts of these student activists
and others around the country, the goal of integrating restaurants
reached the highest office in the United States.
I am therefore asking the Congress to enact legislation
giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities
which are open to the public.
Hotels, restaurants, theaters,
retail stores, and similar establishments.
[Stephen] The risks they took as teenagers
paid off in ways that we are still feeling today.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed,
giving Black Americans the legal right to eat
in any restaurant around the country.
And the legacy of their activism is still alive today
through young entrepreneurs,
like award-winning chef and famed cookbook author Todd Richards
and widely published food writer
and chef Erika Council,
whose fight to keep their restaurants visible
in a historically Black neighborhood
has become a movement of its own.
So growing up in Atlanta, I remember you
as one of the very first and most prominent Black chefs
-that we had in the city… -Mm-hmm.
…and so your voice is really important,
and so I really wanna go
a little bit deeper around your philosophy,
how it's developed over these years.
Uh, when I went to the awards, every nationality was on stage,
but no one was representing our culture.
And I really had to dive back in into myself to understand
that I'm doing great doing everyone else's food,
but what am I doing for my own community?
And especially in a city like Atlanta,
when you look at us being on Old Fourth Ward,
the birthplace of civil rights, the epicenter still of civil rights,
how can I sit here and present someone else's food
and garner awards and not tell my own story, my own family?
And how we make our neighborhoods wholesome and whole
by telling our story on a plate.
I like that.
Man, look at that color.
I'm really excited to have you both here,
and I wanna serve you some delicious soul food.
[jazz music playing]
[Todd] My grandmother cooked many different dishes.
Chicken was always on Sunday,
and she didn't necessarily always would fry it.
She would broil it, she would bake it, boil it.
So I want to do some interpretation of that broiled chicken.
The chicken is brined. A blueberry sweet tea brine.
So I took some leftover sweet tea, added some salt to it.
We, you know, set it overnight, and then we just broiled it.
So this beautiful color comes from the caramelized skin,
a bit of the sugar that's already in the sweet tea
and giving those deep flavors.
So you get this really tannic quality of the blueberry at the end.
To me, it's nothing but umami right at the end.
It's so juicy.
Really, truly.
[Erika] He made this chicken like he's somebody's great-grandad.
Yeah.
-Now, this chicken is extremely on point. -[Todd] Yeah.
I wanna grab some of Erika's biscuits and make a sandwich. [chuckles]
These are our corn biscuits.
-Thank you. -So they have freshly grated corn in them.
I like the way they just pull apart.
-Also, I'm really appreciating the corn… -Mm-hmm.
…that is studded inside of here.
-[Erika] Soul food is vegetables. -[Stephen] Yes.
We always had vegetable. In North Carolina we had vegetable and hogs.
So I mean, corn was always there in the summer. Tomatoes.
And all of that was always incorporated in the biscuit.
So my Great-Aunt Mabel used to make corn milk biscuits.
She'd boil the stock, then the milk.
So I said, "Well, let me do the same," but, you know, just a little iteration.
[Stephen] Wow.
[Todd] It's interesting that Erika talks about tomato in biscuits.
Because my favorite has always been tomato and biscuit,
and the jam… using sherry vinegar,
and it gives it a different acid as well.
[Stephen] Wow, the biscuit, that's good. Try it.
You know, my grandma on my mom's side made biscuits.
So the thing about my mom's side of the family
from Goldsboro, North Carolina, they were into community and civil rights.
So, not only do you learn the art of biscuits,
but everyone learned about the civil rights.
So I'm, like, ten when I'm listening to this story.
One time, she ate at this restaurant,
and she says a group of white students
sat at the table with them. And she said she got so nervous.
-She wasn't sure if she should get up. -[Todd] Mm-hmm.
And they, you know, sort of slid the plate down and said,
"You guys want any? These are pretty good."
Even many many years later, the way she would describe that.
I'm like, "Wow, Granny, you really…" She was almost emotional.
Part of it, you know, she had never really sat at a table with white folks.
You know, you're sitting at my table, and you wanna eat with me.
So, you know, the first time we even talked about biscuits,
she told me that story.
So that's been such a profound thing for me,
even when I make them now. It just has lived with me.
So when people talk about civil rights,
you know, if you actually talk to the people in your family,
I was raised around old people, so I always heard the stories,
but back then, everything was an act of resistance.
Just waking up in the morning
and just existing was an act of resistance.
That's a very profound story
about your grandmother and…
Biscuits.
[Stephen] Yeah.
Choosing to step fully into your Blackness
has actually always been
the greatest form of resistance.
-[Todd] Mm-hmm. -100%.
It's really why soul food is so important because,
in one bite, you can tell a story.
Let's talk about some of the challenges that you faced
in trying to get your businesses open.
The biggest challenge is owning the rights to the space
in which we're cooking here. Uh, we've seen it where
people come, and developers come and just take your building.
You're riding on Auburn Avenue, just looking at the gentrification.
I mean, we have completely, outside of Todd and our Black chefs,
we are non-existent.
These developers, who are majority white,
have the ability to come in and just annihilate our neighborhoods
and build up all these spaces that are unaffordable, unattainable.
We were taught shame about our own food.
That it can never go on anyone's plate.
Uh, that our techniques weren't sound.
Uh, that we were a pinch of this and a pinch of that.
You know, all the tropes and stereotypes of fried chicken.
That it's greasy, it's this and that. Then you go on to our neighborhoods,
there's one fried chicken place on every corner.
-Not owned by us. -Right.
Someone else comes in, mimics our food
-and profits from it. -Yeah.
Gentrification is a unique form of violence
because it's not just about displacing us,
and we don't live here anymore,
but it's the erasure of our culture,
and that is really what I want
the people of Atlanta to come together
and try and preserve, you know.
We, as a community, as a whole, are so powerful.
I just look at what we were able to accomplish
when we all come together and when we say, "This is family."
So we're gonna raise this money. We're gonna build this community center.
You look at the Black neighborhoods and how much of the libraries
and the pharmacists and the bookstores
were built by just community, you know, just fundraising.
That came from us knowing, "Okay, we're all we got."
And I think we have to come back to that, honestly--
Well, y'all are talking-- This is family business for real now.
-I'm saying-- -This is family business.
-This is Atlanta though. -That was not prepared from a script.
I'm with you. I have had so much pride
about growing up in Atlanta.
Being from Atlanta,
I really have always felt an attachment
to this neighborhood in particular.
My earliest memories of being a child in Atlanta,
my mom went to Clark, you know.
This was all about, like, you know, already y'all know.
-Yeah. -[Erika] Yeah.
-And so we still actually have a chance… -Mm-hmm
…in this community
to preserve this history.
I think now we're seeing people coming back around in the community,
focusing back on our cuisine, and saying,
"Hey, you know what? Actually, this is the very foundation
of everything you're eating here."
-[Todd] Absolutely. -And there's so much power in soul food,
the country cook, Southern food, whatever you wanna call it,
that not only have y'all made us feel as though it wasn't good
so you could adapt it and make money off of it,
you know, you had us thinking that we couldn't charge you for it,
while you were opening restaurants
charging $100 a plate for the same thing.
But now we're coming around and saying, "You know what? This is ours."
Let's claim ownership back on it.
Erika could have a church.
Yeah, I could have a church now. Give me a pulpit.
-Erika could have a church for real. -I hear you.
We can do that by making biscuits and chicken
and sit there talking about it.
[Stephen] While expansion and growth are common in many cities,
gentrification is erasing the very culture that built them.
What's our answer to that kind of displacement?
How do we even fight it?
Atlanta has changed so much since I was a kid.
It has me in search of what we can still hold on to.
But I'm not discouraged.
As long as there are chefs like Todd and Erika,
bakers like Cheryl and MJ,
and Black-owned establishments like Paschal's,
Atlanta will always be grounded in the history
of Black food breaking barriers.
While the Civil Rights Movement saw everyday people exacting justice
through defiance in every form,
today a new generation of first-time farmers,
culinary activists,
and chefs, are taking up that mantle
by reclaiming our cultural food practices
and making a strong resurgence back to the land
in order to write the next chapter of Black Liberation.
[low-tempo song playing]