Eating Jim Crow Part 1
13 year old sharecropper near Americus, Georgia, 1937, Courtesy of the Library of Congress
The following are a series of stories created from a WPA short story about an African-American women named Rosa Lee Johnson who lived in Georgia and Alabama between the 1920s into the Great Depression. Here brief culinary biography illustrates the intersectionality of race, caste, and gender in the Jim Crow Southern system. A food system is how a society or community produces, processes, distributes, prepares, consumes food, and disposes of food waste. Johnson grew up in Waycross, Georgia as the child of a sharecropper. Her family existed largely on a diet of corn and syrup and what they raised in the family’s subsistence garden. Sharecropping systematically insured debt peonage, poverty, and the consumption of meat rarely.
