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Welcome to the Southern Foodways Alliance -- an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture with headquarters at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.

The Southern Foodways Alliance documents and celebrates the diverse food cultures of the American South. We set a common table where black and white, rich and poor -- all who gather-- may consider our history and our future in a spirit of reconciliation.

Letter From Birmingham

By Dean Crawford
Gastronomica
Fall 2004

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We picked at our breakfast as Mr. McNair began to speak. There were 140 of us gathered at the McNair Studio to celebrate southern food and the fortieth anniversary of the civil rights struggle, a more appropriate combination than it might at first seem since “soul food” and southern white food have always been the same. This event was organized by the Southern Foodways Alliance and entitled “Alabama in Black and White.” Mr. McNair spoke warmly, welcoming our integrated group of Northerners and Southerners, blacks and whites. Although he could have, he didn’t try to break our hearts or evoke our outrage; smiling often, he just explained how his photography business was adapting to the digital age, how important it was for folks to visit the “niche” dedicated to his daughter Denise, and how she’d be fifty-two if she hadn’t been killed in the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Mr. McNair gave his own age as seventy-eight, his wife’s as seventy-six. He seemed genuinely perplexed to have lived so long after the murder of his eleven-year-old daughter and the three other girls on September 15, 1963.

Chris McNair had a kind face, unmarked by bitterness. By now, all of us had forsaken our breakfasts and turned our chairs to look at him. When asked about Spike Lee’s documentary about the bombing, Mr. McNair admitted that he hadn’t had the courtesy to respond to Spike Lee’s initial letter, even though it was a perfectly good letter and grammatical. He said he’d been concerned that the girls not be victimized twice, once by the segregationists who murdered them and then by people who’d exploit their story. So, for more than thirty years, he’d avoided all public attention beyond allowing folks to see the “niche,” a small room containing Denise’s belongings: her winter coat, her doll, her lunchbox, her white gloves, her prayer book, and a few other things found with her body at the church. The four girls were changing into their choir robes when the bomb went off. They were found together, literally piled, their bodies shattered by the concrete and stone debris propelled by the bomb. The explosion blew out a sizable portion of the church’s exterior wall and stone foundation, as well as blasting out a series of windows. In one stained-glass window depicting Jesus, only His face was blown out; a nearly perfect oval was removed, leaving the rest of the stained-glass scene intact. That such a crime was directed at children, in a church, and a Baptist church, seemed especially strange to contemplate here in Alabama at the center of the Bible Belt. Mr. McNair expressed some satisfaction that three of the bomb conspirators had finally been convicted, Richard Chambliss in 1977 and Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry in 2000. He felt sure that a number of others were involved. Chambliss had had friends and fellow Klansmen on the Birmingham police, and he’d worked at City Hall; furthermore, none of those convicted had had the money or the contacts in industry to purchase such large quantities of dynamite. Still, Mr. McNair was content that he had received some closure at long last. Spike Lee’s film was a good one, he said, but the only reason that he’d decided to allow it was because of a Birmingham schoolgirl he’d met who had never learned about the bombings, never heard about the four little girls in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Spike Lee’s Four Little Girls was nominated for an Oscar in 1997. The FBI reopened the case shortly before the film’s release; that investigation is what led to the conviction of Chambliss’s two surviving co-conspirators.

When Mr. McNair finished speaking, the civil rights photographer Charles Moore spoke briefly and showed a DVD of his images from the era: police clubs and dogs, fire hoses used as weapons, the rough arrest of Dr. Martin Luther King, the glowing smiles of the marchers from Selma to Montgomery. Then we turned back to our tables and our unfinished breakfasts. The biscuits were delicious; the grits were to die for, an expression rendered all the more glib by the subjects at hand. What had we done to earn such a wonderful meal? I had to wonder. And the once-Catholic part of me answered that sustenance is not earned any more than the Eucharist is. It’s a gift. I took another nibble of those grits.

Our group was the grateful recipient of three other great meals besides the McNairs’: a chicken and biscuit breakfast, prepared by local caterers Goren Avery and Verba Ford and featuring the best fried chicken and sausage gravy that I’ve ever had; an elegant lunch at the innovative Highlands Bar and Grill, where Frank Stitt transforms local, down-home ingredients into haute cuisine; and a celebratory dinner to honor the “Sisters of the Skillet,” four ladies who cooked for the civil rights movement and cared for the injured freedom riders. This last event was a high-low gala hosted by Southern Progress, publishers of Southern Living, at their very tony corporate campus and featuring Jim ’N Nick’s Bar-B-Q of Birmingham. As accompaniments we had baked beans, cornmeal muffins, collard greens, coleslaw, pimento cheese-stuffed celery, Wickles sweet and hot pickles, and lemon, chocolate, and banana cream pies, all served lazy Susan style. These are the foods that Southerners share, even though blacks and whites until fairly recently have had to eat separately. These were also the same foods enjoyed by the protesters, when they were lucky enough to get them. Southern food, this most indigenous American culinary tradition was in fact created both by blacks and whites, sometimes cooking together, and for both races it signifies their heritage. Most importantly, though, these foods express the two cultures’ shared attachment to the farm, the place of grandparents and cousins, of fresh ham at first frost, of just-picked corn and butter beans in summer and (yes) watermelon, of home or the idea of it, whether you’ve moved to Chicago or Los Angeles or a gated community outside of Birmingham. Of course, all these shared traditions make segregation seem all the more absurd, not to mention unnatural, but the segregation’s ideological forbear, slavery, was never important to the farm, only to the plantation economy. And the next, uncomfortably class-conscious thoughts—Who benefited from the plantation economy? Who has benefited from keeping poor blacks and whites from linking up ever since?—are only two of the questions raised by a conference pairing southern race and southern food. The conference speakers didn’t address these issues overtly, you understand. But by its very ingredients the conference provoked thought. It gave us plenty to talk about around the supper table.

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