People's Place: Soul Food Restaurants & the Civil Rights Era

Culinary Historians of Chicago

Soul Food Restaurants & the Civil Rights Era Presented by Dave Hoekstra and Paul Nathin Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. loved the fried catfish and lemon icebox pie at Memphis’s Four Way restaurant. Beloved nonagenarian chef Leah Chase introduced George W. Bush to baked cheese grits and scolded Barack Obama for putting Tabasco sauce on her gumbo at New Orleans’s Dooky Chase’s. When SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael asked Ben’s Chili Bowl owners Ben and Virginia Ali to keep the restaurant open during the 1968 Washington, DC, riots, they obliged, feeding police, firefighters, and student activists as they worked together to quell the violence. Celebrated former Chicago Sun-Times columnist Dave Hoekstra unearths these stories and hundreds more as he travels, tastes, and talks his way through twenty of America’s best, liveliest, and most historically significant soul food restau­rants. Following the “soul food corridor” from the South through northern industrial cities, The People’s Place gives voice to the remarkable chefs, workers, and small business owners (often women) who provided sustenance and a safe haven for civil rights pioneers, not to mention presidents and politicians; music, film, and sports legends; and countless everyday, working-class people. Dave Hoekstra was a Chicago Sun-Times staff writer from 1985-2014. His work has also appeared in Playboy magazine, the Chicago Reader and the Journal of Country Music. Ticket To Everywhere, his collection of Sun-Times travel columns, was published by Lake Claremont Press. He also wrote Farm Aid: A Song For America and contributor to The Unofficial Guide To Chicago. Recorded at Kendall College, School of Culinary Arts on February 20, 2016