Angela Jill Cooley. To Live and Dine in Dixie

To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South is such a terrific title that one almost wishes there had been a competition for the privilege of writing the book that uses it. But lawyer-turned-historian Angela Jill Cooley has more than earned her trope. In a mere 154 pages (excluding notes), Cooley marshals fascinating case studies and archival information—focused primarily on the cities of Birmingham, Alabama, and Atlanta, Georgia—to help us understand how and why private eating establishments in the South emerged as key sites of contestation in civil rights–era legal battles over racial segregation. Along the way, Cooley examines the impact of industrialization and standardization on southern foodways from the post-Reconstruction era through the 1960s, as well as the role of urbanization and suburbanization in fomenting these culinary changes. Part I, “Southern Food Culture in Transition, 1876–1935,” explores the infiltration of New England–based practices of scientific cooking in the South and the expansion of cafés as “contested urban space.” Whiteness was increasingly equated with culinary modernization, rationalization, efficiency, and purity, and blackness with the devalued opposites of these terms. Many black colleges resisted the exclusion of African Americans from these values; for instance, they developed their own programs in domestic science. Whites, however, simultaneously began to deploy the law in the public sphere to demarcate the era’s expanding public eateries as domains for whites only. While these restaurants often relied on invisible black labor in the kitchen, they prohibited blacks from equal access to dining areas as patrons. Why, for so many white southerners, was it considered acceptable to eat food prepared by African Americans but not to dine with them? This conundrum drives much of Cooley’s research, and answering it requires attention not just to race but also to longstanding ideologies that defined racial purity in terms of white male control of white female sexuality and to emerging anxieties about the potential for consumer culture to undermine white domination.

Archaeology · Atlanta · Foodways · Modernity · Modernization theory · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Sociology · Suburbanization · Underground Railroad · Anthropology · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies