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WORK TITLE: To Live and Dine in Dixie
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Mankato
STATE: MN
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://sbs.mnsu.edu/history/faculty/cooley.html * http://faculty.mnsu.edu/angelacooley/ * http://humanitiestennessee.org/content/angela-jill-cooley * http://www.food-culture.org/angela-jill-cooley/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:University of Alabama, Ph.D.; George Washington University Law School, J.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS, postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture; Minnesota State University, Mankato, MN, assistant professor of history.
AWARDS:Association for the Study of Food and Society Book Award, for To Live and Dine in Dixie.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Angela Jill Cooley is an assistant professor of history at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, where she taught Southern foodways to graduate students in the Southern Studies program. Cooley, who researches and writes about food, culture, and history, has a Ph.D. from the University of Alabama and a J.D. from the George Washington University Law School.
In 2015 Cooley published To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South. Spanning the 1900s to the 1960s, the book examines how race, ethnicity, class, and gender contributed to the development and persistence of racial segregation in public restaurants. She explains how blacks saw eating places as sites of political participation and access, while white supremacists saw desegregation as a challenge to property rights and loss of local control over racial issues. Cooley covers legal changes over the years, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, desegregation in restaurants, eating practices in Southern cities, local women’s clubs’ role in public dining policies, and changes made by the U.S. Congress.
On the Association for the Study of Food and Society Web site, Cooley explained how she combined history, law, and food studies into her book: “I didn’t know any scholars who studied foodways when I was in graduate school at the University of Alabama. But I was lucky to have an amazing advisor who helped me to understand that food culture was an important part of the civil rights story I wanted to tell about Ollie’s Barbecue.” From there, Cooley researched anthropology, food culture, and how scholars wrote about food. In the book, Cooley explains how segregation and eating went hand in hand, as policymakers feared that black men and white women would interact in restaurants. She also explained how class and gender norms were preserved and how white women equated “proper” food preparation with white supremacy.
A reviewer in California Bookwatch noted the ranging issues of civil rights relationship with food and observed: “As a culinary history per se it’s something quite different.” Writing in Journal of Southern History, Stephanie Cole commented: “Clearly, Cooley’s training in both the law and cultural history serve her well. Her attention to white women and the ways the ideology of race and gender operated in the Jim Crow South fits comfortably within a growing literature on southern food, women’s experiences, and the culture of segregation.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
California Bookwatch, August, 2015, review of To Live and Dine in Dixie.
Journal of Southern History, November, 2016, Stephanie Cole, To Live and Dine in Dixie, p. 951.
ONLINE
Association for the Study of Food and Society, http://www.food-culture.org/ (August 1, 2017), author interview.
Minnesota State University Mankato Web site, http://sbs.mnsu.edu/ (August 1, 2017), author faculty profile.*
Angela Jill Cooley
Dr. Angela Jill Cooley
Dr. Angela Jill Cooley
First of all, congratulations on your book, To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South, which won this year’s ASFS book award. How long have you been an ASFS member? What first drew you to the organization?
It’s a real honor to have ASFS recognize my book. I’ve been a member for several years. I think I joined around 2011 or 2012 when I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. My role was to teach Southern Foodways primarily to graduate students in the Southern Studies program. I initially saw the organization as a way to engage my students in a broader academic community. I encouraged one of my graduate students to present research he conducted for my class at the ASFS conference in New York during that time. Over the years, I’ve also enjoyed the scholarly relationships and publications from ASFS.
You manage to fuse history, law, and food studies together in your research. How have these strands come together for you?
I didn’t know any scholars who studied foodways when I was in graduate school at the University of Alabama. But I was lucky to have an amazing advisor who helped me to understand that food culture was an important part of the civil rights story I wanted to tell about Ollie’s Barbecue. She encouraged me to read anthropologists, like Mary Douglas and Claude Levi-Strauss, who formed the theoretical underpinnings of how we understand food culture. The resulting dissertation included all three elements you mentioned–history, law, and food studies–but probably emphasized food culture because I had become so immersed in reading these scholars. I would sit on the floor at the library in the section where food studies books were housed and read everything I could find to better understand how scholars wrote about food. At some point while I was working on the dissertation, Psyche Williams-Forson published Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs. I remember reading that book and thinking that I’d finally discovered the type of scholar I wanted to be. I wanted my research to use food and food practices as a lens to understand power struggles in society. When I reworked the dissertation into a book manuscript I used the Ollie’s Barbecue case as more of a framework and, as a result, emphasized the legal studies aspect of the book a little more.
You mentioned Ollie’s Barbecue, a restaurant you were familiar with growing up in Birmingham and re-encountered in law school. Your book also begins by talking about Ollie’s. Can you tell us more about what motivated you to do the research behind this book and what was it like for you to return to familiar places and foodscapes as a scholar?
The research for this book started as a seminar paper I wrote about this Supreme Court case that had captivated my attention in law school. The case, Katzenbach v. McClung, upheld the desegregation of restaurants under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I had eaten at Ollie’s Barbecue in the early 1990s when I was in college in Birmingham, but honestly I don’t remember a lot about it because I didn’t realize there was anything special about the place until I read the case in law school years later. By the time I was in graduate school, researching the history of the case, Ollie’s was no longer open. When I initially started the research, I recall telling someone that I was researching racial segregation in Birmingham in 1964 (the year of both the federal civil rights act and the McClung decision). The initial response was that Birmingham repealed its segregation law in 1963 so there was no racial segregation by 1964. Although I knew that Birmingham had repealed its segregation law in 1963, I also knew there must be more to the story. By the time I was writing the book, I had discovered that Birmingham had repealed its law specifically to allow private entrepreneurs, like Ollie McClung and his son, to continue segregating their restaurants. By 1963, the Supreme Court had ruled that if a city has a segregation law on its books, then such laws are unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. But if there was no law requiring segregation, then private restaurant owners were free to refuse service to anyone because private individuals are not subject to the 14th Amendment. After the repeal, Ollie’s continued a long tradition of cultural (or de facto) segregation in public eating places that had existed across the nation. It’s a part of the story I don’t think anyone had ever thought about before because they had not connected Birmingham’s actions to what was happening in the Supreme Court and elsewhere across the country. I was glad to be able to take a local story and show how it connected to regional and national food history. I also enjoyed researching in my home town. I did a lot of the research at the Birmingham Public Library where I first learned to conduct historical research in junior high school. So it was very nostalgic for me.
To Live and Dine in Dixie ends by discussing the legacy of foodways in the Jim Crow South. When you tell people about your book and your research, what examples do you use to show them that issues of structural inequality persist in Southern foodways (and American foodways more broadly)?
I ended the book by focusing on Cracker Barrel, a chain that didn’t open until after restaurant integration was established federal law. Several scholars have written about Cracker Barrel, including Susie Penman, one of my graduate students at the University of Mississippi, so I relied a lot on their research to show how Cracker Barrel continued to reflect the themes of my work, particularly the act of coding southern food as necessarily white, until quite recently. My current work is influenced by contemporary food justice scholarship. I’m interested in how communities–marginalized because of socio-economic circumstances, race, and other factors–continue to have a harder time accessing sufficient quantities of nutritious foods. I find that scholarship tends to emphasize contemporary urban areas often outside of the South. As a southern historian, I want to explore the history of rural communities in the region, how black farm families experienced food insecurity, and local civil rights activism advocating food access. I recently published a book chapter focusing on Fannie Lou Hamer’s food justice activism in Mississippi in the late 1960s, and I plan to turn it into my next book manuscript.
Angela Jill Cooley with Minnesota State Mankato students at the Big Apple Inn in Jackson, Mississippi, home of the pig ear sandwich.
Angela Jill Cooley with Minnesota State Mankato students at the Big Apple Inn in Jackson, Mississippi, home of the pig ear sandwich.
You teach courses on Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, and the New Deal. How often does food come up in your teaching?
I taught Southern Foodways and food history courses at the University of Mississippi for two years. Those classes were based largely on my research and the work of other southern food scholars. I also taught a course on Food and Labor in the Twentieth-Century United States last year at Minnesota State Mankato. That was a fun class to teach because I wanted to take advantage of living and working in the Upper Midwest to teach about Great Plains agriculture and industrial food history, both of which are very different from my experience teaching and researching southern food culture. Among other assignments, the class took a field trip to Minneapolis to learn about flour processing at the Mill City Museum. So, I learned as much as my students did in that class. Food doesn’t come up much in my Constitutional History classes, except that I assign my students the Katzenbach v. McClung case, so we study Ollie’s Barbecue. In my civil rights classes, students engage with the sit-in movement. I sometimes assign John Lewis’s memoir, which describes his experiences in Nashville. I also ask students to think about food access as a civil right, and I’ve assigned Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi to help students understand the ways poverty and civil rights intersect. One of my favorite classes was a study away course to Mississippi. In addition to studying civil rights and memory, I was able to introduce my Minnesota students to southern foods. We had barbecue and tamales in Memphis and pig ear sandwiches in Jackson.
A taste of home (using Minnesota farmers' market produce).
A taste of home (using Minnesota farmers’ market produce).
Twitter reveals you to be a football fan and an at-least-occasional cook (that okra looked delicious). What do you make for game days?
I don’t get to many football games anymore because I live in Minnesota and cheer for the University of Alabama. Roll Tide! But my go-to meal on a Saturday afternoon is chili. It’s comfort food that helps keep me warm on the cold Minnesota days and nights. It also freezes well so it makes a quick meal on a weekday when I don’t have time to cook. In the summer and fall, I enjoy going to Mankato’s farmers market for fresh vegetables. I can sometimes find okra there. It’s not a common dish up here, but some of the local farmers grow it. I fry it in my requisite southern-girl cast iron skillet. It tastes like home.
You’ve lived in Alabama, DC, Mississippi, and Minnesota. Is there a recipe you’ve picked up in one of those places that has come to mean something special to you?
My favorite recipe is my grandmother’s divinity candy. She made it every holiday, and the whole family looked forward to it. After she passed away, my mother and I started making it. Neither one of us had much experience with candy making so we learned together. I love my grandmother’s recipe. It’s handwritten in a booklet of her recipes that my uncle gave us shortly before she died. A recipe really is the best gift because a part of the giver stays with you even after she’s gone. But Granny’s recipe is written in such a way that only someone who already knows how to make divinity can understand it. The ingredients are simple, just sugar, syrup, and egg whites. But it’s the technique that is important. Granny’s recipe says to stir the mixture to “dropping consistency.” Of course, neither my mother nor I understood what that meant. I cross referenced my grandmother’s recipe with the divinity recipe in Joy of Cooking to get the technique right. Now, my mother and I make it every December and give it to friends and family for Christmas. We’ve gotten pretty good at making it. I think Granny would be proud.
Angela Jill Cooley
is an assistant professor of history at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She has a PhD from the University of Alabama and a JD from the George Washington University Law School.
Angela Jill Cooley
Angela Jill Cooley
Courses taught
History 191: U.S. Since 1877
History 430/530: U.S. Constitution
History 430/530: Anne Moody's Mississippi: Race, Culture, and Civil Rights
History 469/569: U.S. Constitutional History from 1896
History 481/581: U.S. Civil Rights
History 495: Senior Seminar: The New Deal and The Law
History 604: Reading Seminar
Education
Ph.D., University of Alabama
J.D. George Washington University
Fields of Study
Twentieth-Century U.S.
Civil Rights
Constitutional and Legal
Foodways
To Live and Dine in Dixie
California Bookwatch. (Aug. 2015):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
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To Live and Dine in Dixie
Angela Jill Cooley
University of Georgia Press
330 Research Drive, Athens, GA, 30602-4901
9780820347592, $24.95, www.ugapress.org
To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South explores the changing food of the urban American South during the Jim Crow era, considering how race, ethnicity, class, and gender contributed to the development of racial segregation in public eating places. It officers a history centered in the 1900s to the 1960s and identifies the differences between activists who viewed public eating places as sites of political participation and those who struggled with desegregation as a challenge to property rights. While this book could easily be considered as a focus on civil rights issues over food, it uses urban food places and gatherings to explain how cooking and dining translate to public issues. As a culinary history persay it's something quite different, and is a recommendation for not just food history readers, but any involved in civil rights history and issues.
To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South
Stephanie Cole
Journal of Southern History. 82.4 (Nov. 2016): p951.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
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To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South. By Angela Jill Cooley. Southern Foodways Alliance Studies in Culture, People, and Place. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 207. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4759-2; cloth, $69.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4758-5.)
In this fascinating look at the social and legal effects of changing foodways in the twentieth-century South, Angela Jill Cooley argues that white southerners prioritized racial and gender control as they adapted first to a new urban culture and then to a mass consumer economy. In the Progressive era, white housekeepers marginalized African American cooks by promoting "euthenics"--a pseudoscience created by home economics founder Ellen H. Richards oriented toward improving the white race through imposing certain household standards (p. 30). After World War II, white southern proprietors turned to the language of personal rights and what Cooley terms the "myth of private space" to justify segregated public eating spaces (p. 136). Throughout the book, Cooley charts how white southerners benefited from the trends that made food more democratic--economic growth and nationalizing food practices--while claiming that the democratic legal shift associated with civil rights legislation was too intrusive. Such astute analysis characterizes this book, making it essential reading for historians of segregation in the South.
While using a well-established periodization Cooley offers some significant new insights. In the first part of the twentieth century southern white women, influenced by the rise of domestic science and growing racial problems, attempted to connect proper food preparation to white supremacy. In public eating spaces, as lunch counters and other types of public eateries proliferated, policy makers feared that white women and black men might interact in locations beyond elite control. Cooley's careful research here indicates that racial segregation was part of a long-standing effort to impose order that initially focused on deviations by class and gender. For example, the Atlanta city council sought to keep restaurateurs from offering free food with alcohol sales, assuming the practice encouraged post-dinner interactions among men and women. But there and elsewhere, immigrant proprietors occasionally flouted the custom of maintaining dining rooms for elite white women, and further transgressed by employing white women as waitresses, who might then serve black men. By 1914 cities across the South began banning interracial eating, fearing that it contributed "to racial mixing and thereby challenge[d] racial purity" (p. 65).
Between 1936 and 1959 federal food regulations, public education, and economic expansion brought food sciences into the mainstream and made public eating much more widespread. On the home front, a fad in "Old South" cookbooks allowed white society women to create new historical memory by shoring up images of black women as happily servile cooks and the South as a distinctive region. Meanwhile, fewer people were actually eating at home. The climate and a regional proclivity toward suburbanization and car culture meant that the new fast food industry did very well in the South. But national chains forfeited the chance to bring democratic eating rules to regional franchises by trading on an idealized image of white middleclass families; local customs prevailed, and African American diners found eating while traveling more difficult than ever.
After 1960, segregationists made restaurants a focal point of their massive resistance to the civil rights movement. Cooley's careful analysis of restaurant proprietors Lester Maddox and Ollie McClung Sr. demonstrates how those men conflated family restaurants with private spaces in which white women could expect protection from black men. Cooley corrects previous interpretations of the repeal of Birmingham's segregation ordinance in 1963, noting that the city council did so not in a progressive nod toward the inevitable, but rather as a legal strategy. Earlier that year the U.S. Supreme Court had decided that such ordinances were unconstitutional. In rescinding its ordinance, the Birmingham city council hoped that private actions by local restaurateurs who did not advertise or bring customers across state lines could stand. In Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), the Court put to rest that hope, ruling that all restaurants, even a small family-owned barbecue joint in Birmingham, relied to some extent on interstate commerce and were therefore subject to antidiscrimination mandates.
Clearly, Cooley's training in both the law and cultural history serve her well. Her attention to white women and the ways the ideology of race and gender operated in the Jim Crow South fits comfortably within a growing literature on southern food, women's experiences, and the culture of segregation. As a study of the white community's customary practices and legal manipulations, this book has few African American voices. But everybody eats, and after reading To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South no one could lose sight of the price African Americans paid on a daily basis in the kitchens and restaurants of the Jim Crow South.
STEPHANIE COLE
University of Texas at Arlington
Cole, Stephanie