Yet these reforms would not be easy. Dr. Saunders found that it was far easier to suggest changes than to implement them. For example, during his tenure as head of cardiology at Providence Hospital in Baltimore, Saunders remembers the battle he faced in getting the food service department to serve heart-healthy meals to his African American patients who were hospitalized for heart attacks and strokes. Moreover, Saunders could not persuade the hospital’s cafeteria to move beyond a typical soul food menu: “they voted me down,” he says. In contrast to the four doctors quoted, historically African American physicians have been resistant to reform the soul food diet because of the belief that to do so would make African Americans into “somebody else,” says Saunders.12
The silence of black doctors on nutrition left an opening filled by the Nation of Islam, college students exposed to alternative views of eating, and advocates of natural food diets. For almost twenty years, these three groups were the only ones within African American communities talking about the importance of diet and exercise. The Nation of Islam, for example, had no concerns about African Americans becoming something they were not. They argued that that had already happened during slavery: “Peas, collard greens, turnip greens, sweet potatoes and white potatoes are very cheaply raised foods [boldfaced in the original text],” said Elijah Muhammad. “The Southern slave masters used them to feed the slaves, and still advise the consumption of them.”13 Elijah Muhammad argued that African Americans learned a destructive culture from an oppressive white Christian power structure during slavery and that this included their traditional diet. The change of the African American diet was one of the first radical changes a person made after joining the Nation of Islam.
THE NATION OF ISLAM
In the 1960s the Nation’s training program for new converts at its Mount Vernon temple in Westchester County included extensive teaching on nutrition, with particular emphasis on not eating pork. Convert Eugene Watts recalled receiving about eight weeks of diet and nutritional instruction, much of it in the form of taped lectures given by Elijah Muhammad on the subject.14 For many non-Muslims, the introduction to Nation’s teachings on eating came from Elijah Muhammad’s two-volume book How to Eat to Live, published in 1967 and 1972.
Despite the popularity of soul food in the 1960s and 1970s, food rebels like Elijah Muhammad had an impact in black communities. Yet there were no problems between food rebels like the members of the Nation of Islam and black nationalists like Amiri Baraka who advocated soul food as black folk’s cuisine. “I mean, look at Elijah Muhammad, there were a whole lot of Baptists that would never be Muslim, but they stopped eating pork,” says Dick Gregory.15
Many were familiar with the Nation’s swine restrictions, but Muhammad was also a staunch proponent of eating whole grains and opposed the consumption of processed foods like white rice, bread, and sugar. “Eat wheat—never white flour, which has been robbed of all its natural vitamins and proteins sold separately as cereals,” says Muhammad. “You know as well as I that the white race is a commercializing people and they do not worry about the lives they jeopardize so long as the dollar is safe. You might find yourself eating death if you follow them.”16 Muhammad theorized that blue-eyed white devils had conspired to use deadly white eating habits to eliminate blacks. Whites, he explained, promoted the consumption of unhealthy processed food and spicy and greasy food in order to weaken and eventually wear out black folk. “Muslim lore,” as one historian puts it, maintained that years of following white foodways were ultimately responsible for multiplying sickness and disease and severely lowering life expectancy in African American communities. The Nation argued that the white’s food conspiracy worked both to eradicate black people and to make white medical doctors and undertakers rich.17
Most likely, members of the Nation sold copies of How to Eat to Live the same way they sold the Nation of Islam’s paper The Final Call and its delicious and nutritious bean pies: by direct marketing on street corners and in businesses operated by its members. In African American communities in metropolitan New York as well as in other parts of the country, the Nation operated its own supermarkets, fish markets, and restaurants. Male members of the Nation also hawked merchandise at busy intersections. Some street vendors were sympathetic to the message of the Nation and contributed by selling literature and the recorded lectures of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X.
BEAN PIE RECIPE
2 cups navy beans (cooked)
1 stick butter
1 14-oz. can evaporated milk
4 eggs
1 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. cinnamon
2 tbsp. flour
2 cups sugar
2 tbsp. vanilla
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In electric blender, blend together beans, butter, milk, eggs, nutmeg, cinnamon, and flour for around two minutes on medium speed. Put mixture in a large mixing bowl. Mix in sugar and vanilla. Stir well. Pour into pie shells. Bake for around an hour until golden brown. Yields two to three pies.
Adapted from www.muhammadspeaks.com/Pie.html
Starting in 1954, Malcolm X and the members of Temple 7 were the face of the Nation of Islam’s message about food in metropolitan New York.18 The only African Americans he knew of “who had any sense of being very disciplined nutritionally would probably be the Muslims,” says Harlem native Roy Miller. “I think that Malcolm X personified that publicly,” Miller maintains. On many occasions, “he spoke very vigilantly about, ‘you don’t eat that pig,’ and all that sort of stuff.” In what he said and how he lived, Malcolm, says Miller, “made a lot of people conscious about what they were eating and being very careful about what you were eating.” Rudy Bradshaw, another Harlem native, had a brother who was very close to Malcolm. He said that if you went to a place to eat and ordered pork, “Malcolm would ridicule you in a joking way. . . he did that with [Harlem intellectuals] John Hendrik Clarke and Dr. Benyohagen [aka Dr. Ben].” He would remind them that the pig is the dirtiest animal on the farm and subsequently over time persuaded them and others to reform their eating traditions. In contrast to soul food restaurants, Black Muslim restaurants served beef and fish meals with brown rice, fresh vegetables, bean soup, and bean pies.19
FIGURE 9.1 World heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, right, with Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, New York City, March 1, 1964. AP Image Collection.
The earliest challenges to soul food traditions in Westchester came from members of the Nation of Islam in the 1960s. Reginald Ward became a permanent fixture in Mount Vernon’s African American community. Speaking of the influence of the Nation in the city, he recalls that a number of people he knew became Muslims and reformed their eating habits. In fact, Louis Farrakhan, who assumed most of Malcolm’s responsibilities in metropolitan New York after Malcolm left the Nation in 1965, came to speak in Mount Vernon in the 1970s. Eugene Watts from Virginia was one of Ward’s friends who converted to Islam.20
During the 1960s Eugene Watts operated a barbershop on Third Street in Mount Vernon. Next to his shop was a restaurant called Philly’s Bake and Take owned by a member of the Nation of Islam. The restaurant “did really really good” business, says Watts. “I still hear people, and this has been over fifteen years, talk about how they miss that restaurant.” The restaurant’s cook at one time was a “Sister Lana.” She also cooked for the Muslim convert and heavy-weight champion Muhammad Ali and “would go down to Harlem to Temple 7 and help them prepare food, and then come up here to Mount Vernon.” Her specialty, recalls Watts, was bean soup. “That was an important staple for Muslims, the great northern bean. And [Sister Lana] would fix it in such a way that people would be lined up out the door to get a cup of this soup. . . . These were regular [non-Muslim customers].” When people heard that Sister Lana was in town, they quickly made their way over to Third Street. After a while, Watts began attending the Nation’s Mount Vernon temple and eventually converted.21
After his conversion, Watts regularly played Nation of Islam audiocassette “t
apes on how to eat” in his barbershop as a way of disseminating the teachings on food to his male customers. Watts recalls that in the 1960s the Nation had a major impact on black Mount Vernon, particularly on young African American males. There were also those who never converted but agreed with the Nation’s message on food reform. He insists there were plenty of sympathizers who would say, “I admire what you are doing and I have your back. I just can’t give up too much like you’re giving it up.” Watts goes on to say that, back then, if you went down to the Temple and showed an inability to sit still or sweated profusely, “the brothers would take you to the side and tell you that you were not eating the right stuff.”22
Watts decided to become a vegetarian for health reasons shortly after converting to the Nation of Islam. “Afterwards I found out that my family had a history of high cholesterol and high blood pressure, a lot of medical problems associated with rich food.” Watts’s mother died at age thirty-seven of an aneurysm brought on by high blood pressure when he was a senior in high school.23 Hypertension specialist Dr. Elijah Saunders confirms that the consumption of foods high in cholesterol and saturated fats leads to atherosclerosis, or cardiovascular disease, which is what causes heart attacks and brain aneurysms, both particularly prevalent among African Americans. Cholesterol and fat levels in the blood are directly related to diet and lifestyle. Saunders argues that “pork organs and extremities” such as chitlins and pigs’ feet are also very high in saturated fat and increase one’s risk factors for an aneurysm or heart attack.24 Two nights before Eugene Watts’s mother died, she ate a large bowl of chitlins. Watts says his mother “loved chitlins, and she was not supposed to eat them, and a neighbor brought them over, saying ‘Ms. Watts, I fixed them just for you, you are going to love these chitlins.’” Once on the Nation’s eating regimen, Eugene Watts stopped eating beef and fish as well as the pork so beloved by his mother.25
In 1962 the Nation of Islam claimed a membership of over a quarter of a million people. Elijah Muhammad sent Malcolm X, perhaps the Nation’s best evangelist in the 1950s, to organize new temples in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Atlanta. In New York, Malcolm and his assistants sought to draw in possible converts to the Nation of Islam by “‘fishing’ on those Harlem corners—on the fringe of the Nationalist meetings.” Of this activity, Malcolm X recalled that “everyone who was listening was interested in the revolution of the black race.” He also fished at “little evangelical storefront churches. . . . These congregations were usually Southern migrant people, usually older, who would go anywhere to hear what they called ‘good preaching.’” Yet there was also the offer of a soul food dinner. There were always members of the church “who were always putting out little signs announcing that inside they were selling fried chicken and chitlin’ dinners to raise some money.”26
The Nation also fished among the black working class and underclass. Particular efforts were made to fish incarcerated African American men, and indeed many who converted to Islam did so while in prison. Malcolm found that most of the people he preached to believed what he had to say about racism in America and immorality and ignorance among African Americans. But in the words of Malcolm, “our strict moral code and discipline was what repelled them most.” He would explain to potential converts that, among other requirements, giving up “eating of the filthy pork or other injurious or unhealthful foods” was necessary if blacks were to move beyond the white man’s goal of keeping them “immoral, unclean, and ignorant.”27 It was a lot easier to give up eating pork economically when you were in an institution and state officials provided you with three free meals a day. The economic reality for meat-eating African Americans living outside the controlled environment of prison walls was very different. Bobby Seale (originally from Texas) was the cofounder and designated cook of the “shotgun, rifle, and pistol-packing” Black Panther Party for Self-Defense of Oakland, California. He cooked affordable meals for the organization’s meetings in the early days of the party. “I cooked our meals of piles of spaghetti or [pork] neckbones and greens, and while we ate, sucking and shining our neckbones, I raised jokes about the Muslim’s organization not eating pork,” says Seale. He goes on say, “Our grudge was against the racist white power-structure,” not against ham hocks. It was a whole lot cheaper to buy a ham hock than other cuts of meat.28 The Nation’s antiswine message hit people’s pocketbooks, but, more important, it challenged their traditions. Many met it with contempt, believing it to be foolishness because they had been raised on pork. For this reason, the Nation’s antiswine message had its greatest influence among younger folk without well-established traditions of their own.
Clara Bullard Pittman, born in 1948, observed that in the 1970s the Nation’s food reform message made virtually no impact on her older relatives who relocated from Pinehurst, Georgia, to St. Petersburg, Florida. “That age group, they were like, ‘No! We grew up on soul food, that’s our diet, and we are not going to stop. Pork has not killed me yet so I am going to keep eating it.’” In contrast, during the same period, Clara Bullard Pittman observed, “A lot of the young brothers” in northern California joining the Nation and reforming their eating habits, including no longer eating pork.29
Joan B. Lewis made similar observations about metropolitan Washington, D.C., in the 1960s and 1970s. She remembered quite a few African American men who had been incarcerated and returned from prison as non-pork-eating members of the Nation. She and others living in the District of Columbia described a scene in which the presence of the Nation of Islam was very strong.30 Dr. Rodney Ellis, a native Washingtonian, was a Howard University undergraduate in northwest Washington, D.C., between 1966 and 1970. Ellis, too, argues that a change in African American attitudes toward some soul food can be traced back to the 1960s and to activists like Dick Gregory and the antiswine teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the members of the Nation of Islam. For example, Ellis recalls, “I will never forget Muhammad Ali coming to campus about 1966, 1967, and making fun of black folks eating pigs’ feet. . . . You know everybody was enthralled by him, and he must have had a sellout crowd of people. . . . I remember him on two occasions talking about ‘sticky pigs’ feet, it sticks to your hands, it gets stuck together. You know what that is, that is pus, you’re eating pus!’ Man, that turned a whole lot of people, I think. . . to having some concerns.” Ellis goes on to say that, though many African American students at Howard may not have given up “bacon and ribs” after hearing Ali, they did leave the lecture reevaluating their eating habits and the wisdom of continuing to eat pigs’ feet and chitlins.31
ADVOCATES OF NATURAL FOOD DIETS
Exposure to food rebels like Muhammad Ali and other members of the Nation of Islam led some African American undergraduates and graduate students to consider a radical break from traditional soul food, but others broke away after hearing a lecture on natural living from Dr. Alvenia M. Fulton (1907–1999) or Dick Gregory. Gregory says, “I don’t know anybody, other than Elijah Muhammad, and his was an organization, that had the ear of African Americans like [Dr. Fulton] did. [Elijah Muhammad] had it on a national level, she had it beginning in Chicago, then [her message] started reaching out more toward white folk when she would go to the conferences.” He adds, Dr. Fulton was “at the forefront” of what has became a trillion-dollar health and fitness movement. “She was very well respected by that whole white movement because they knew about her fasting knowledge, and in the black community” because her knowledge of herbs and nutrition was making sick people well.32
In the 1960s the Playboy Club was the most famous in the country. Hefner caught Gregory’s show and in 1961 signed him to a three-year contract worth $250 a week. “After Hefner hired me, all kinds of things started to happen,” recalls Gregory. “I started to get press notices, the newspapers sent people by to review my act, and the columnists started quoting my jokes.” Meeting Martin Luther King, Jr., changed Gregory from a comedian to a civil rights activist. It was during the civil rights movement and Vietna
m War that Gregory became one of the country’s leading nightclub comics, political satirists, and activists.33
In an interview, I asked him how he became a vegetarian. He explained that one day, possibly during a civil rights march in the South, a sheriff kicked his wife, and he didn’t come to her defense. “I had to convince myself,” says Gregory, “that the reason that I didn’t do anything about it was because I was nonviolent.” He adds, “Then I said, ‘If thou shalt not kill,’ that should mean animals, too. So in 1963 I just decided I wasn’t going to eat anything else that had to be killed,” he explains. “I still drank a fifth of scotch a day and smoked four packs of cigarettes. So my becoming a vegetarian didn’t have anything to do with health reasons. And I didn’t even know how to spell it; I didn’t know what a vegetarian was.” But, after about eighteen months of being a vegetarian, his sinus trouble disappeared, and about six months after so did his ulcers. That “was the first time I realized that there was something about the food that they didn’t tell us about.”34 Starting in 1967, even more enlightenment came when Gregory met Dr. Alvenia M. Fulton.
Fulton migrated to Chicago from Pulaski, Tennessee. In the 1950s she opened Fultonia’s, a combination health food store, restaurant, and herbal pharmacy at 65th and Eberhardt on Chicago’s South Side. When Fultonia’s started, it was a real oddity; it was only later that people embraced the message of natural living in the United States, especially in African American communities where soul food constituted a large part of local cultural traditions.35 Fulton’s restaurant had a full menu that included soups, vegetarian chili, brown rice, vegetables, all varieties of fruit and vegetable juices, and whole grain breads and cakes. Fulton called her food, “soul food with a mission, and the mission is good health.”36