Dreaming of Fried Chicken and Biscuits
African-American family eating dinner with biscuits, Courtesy of the New York Public Library
We've been celebrating the start of new academic year with a back to school series through the lens of food. As a college student in the 1940s, Civil Rights leader Ralph David Abernathy led a student strike to protest food inequalities between faculty and students in the cafeteria of Alabama State College (Now Alabama State University (ASU). Abernathy enrolled in Alabama State on the GI Bill after serving in the Army. His classmates elected him student body president in his sophomore year. He remembers the students at Alabama State eating “heaps of steaming pork and beans—and nothing more, not even a piece of bread to sop it up,” for lunch. Dinner was not much different: spam with unbuttered grits, while the faculty feasted on country ham. “After several weeks of this fare, we were sick to death of it and were dreaming every night of fried chicken and biscuits.” Abernathy would go on to organize a successful student boycott of the cafeteria that resulted in student access to "huge platters of fried chicken" and other culinary improvements as well.
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