n 1963, SNCC organized a voter registration drive among African-Americans in Leflore County Mississippi in the Mississippi Delta. Slowly a number of African-Americans began heading up at the County Courthouse to register to vote.
All in Food and Social Movements
n 1963, SNCC organized a voter registration drive among African-Americans in Leflore County Mississippi in the Mississippi Delta. Slowly a number of African-Americans began heading up at the County Courthouse to register to vote.
The pace of the civil rights movement accelerated with the return of World War II soldiers like Medger Evers who fought in France and earned the rank of sergeant during the war. He returned to his home state of Mississippi where he went on to become Mississippi’s first NAACP field secretary setting up his office in Jackson over the top of the Big Apple Inn restaurant. Still open today, Juan “Big John” Mora (1890-1976) opened it back in 1939. Evers did not have adequate office space to hold meetings, and he would often hold them down stairs in Big John's where he would discuss civil rights organizing and protest strategies. When customers came in they liked what they
What prompted you to write this book?
The idea for the book came from an NPR segment from the Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson, and their series which they call Hidden Kitchens. I listened to a story about Georgia Gilmore's hidden Kitchen contribution to the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. From there I started doing research on the role of food in social movements and wrote about it on my blog in a series I call Feeding the Revolution.
Starting in the 1920s, The New Negro Alliance’s ( NNA) movement focused on ending racist hiring and promoting nondiscriminatory practices in the food industry in the nation’s capital. William H. Hastie, who had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College before earning a Harvard law degree, serve as one of the organization’s attorneys.
The New Negro Alliance in Washington, D.C. had the largest and most successful direct action movement of the 1920s through the 1940s.
