5 Cultural Nationalist Foodways in Newark and Brooklyn

Amiri Baraka, one of the most influential activists of the era, has been frequently portrayed as a supporter of traditional African American foodways in the wake of his passionate 1962 essay titled “Soul Food.” Baraka hinted at what he regarded as the metaphysical properties of soul food when he answered a question about whether sweet potato pies tasted anything like pumpkin, saying, “They taste more like memory.”51 His poetic tribute to foods like hog maws, okra, and hoecakes has immortalized him as a defender of that diet, leading food studies scholar Doris Witt to label Baraka a “proponent” of black regional southern cooking in opposition to “detractors” such as Elijah Muhammad and Dick Gregory.52 Similarly, historian Frederick Douglass Opie contrasts Baraka and Muhammad, portraying them both as advocates for race pride who nonetheless had different concepts about proper food habits. Opie claims that Baraka “advocated soul food as black folk’s cuisine” in contrast to NOI “food rebels” who eschewed pork and other southern staples such as black-eyed peas.53 However, these generalizations obscure Baraka’s own culinary evolution throughout the 1960s.

By the end of the decade, Baraka and the other members of his Newark circle “did not eat meat, only fish, and otherwise were vegetarians.”54 Baraka, no stranger to personal evolutions, transformed himself from the Beatnik poet LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka, a central figure of the Black Arts Movement. He also evolved from soul food proponent to the leader of an organization that rejected traditional, southern food practices as harmful to communal health. Baraka went from praising soul food as “good filling grease” in 1962 to an asceticism that led him to give up alcohol and tobacco and to reassess his relationship to traditional African American cooking.55 His earlier embrace of soul food invoked racial pride in black cuisine. It also allowed room for the hedonistic pleasure of taste sensations. However, his new stance on dietary matters encouraged him to consider food choices as a matter of self-discipline. By putting dietary decision-making into the hands of the black leadership, culinary nationalists like Baraka sought to free themselves from the shadow of the slave diet that had been regulated by white oppressors. They did not reject the premise of hierarchy as much as they resented the fact that black dietaries had historically been as influenced by the white power structure as by black culinary volition. Baraka’s dietary turn sought to institute a new order and a new system of national culinary allegiances.

Although his ideological journey eventually shifted him out of the orbit of cultural nationalism into a race-conscious Marxist sensibility, in the late 1960s Baraka took inspiration from Karenga’s emphasis on cultural nation-building. Under the auspices of the Committee for Unified Newark (CFUN), Baraka joined Karenga in self-consciously creating cultural traditions that he hoped would foster a shared sense of identity. Theorists of the movement analyzed the relationship of the black community (which they labeled “Afrikan”) to the fine arts, to modern technology, and to various religious, educational, and political institutions.56 In position papers, Baraka and his collaborators made specific programmatic recommendations about how the black community should be organized, beginning with the family unit. Their patriarchal concept of the family emphasized male-dominated, heterosexual relationships and called for the performance of rituals to celebrate the creation of black families. Milestones such as marriage, the birth of a child, and death were to be commemorated in culturally specific ways, which included attention to the kind of foods served at these events.

By putting dietary decision-making into the hands of the black leadership, culinary nationalists like Baraka sought to free themselves from the shadow of the slave diet that had been regulated by white oppressors.

To teach these principles, Baraka led a “Political School of Kawaida” in Newark. Drawn from a Swahili word meaning “customs” or “systems,” kawaida referred to cultural nationalist values and rituals, which included ideas about food consumption. Baraka urged cooperative buying as a means to channel economic power and cooperative eating as an important ritual used to encourage group solidary. The ideal chakula (food) that was to be served at family or community gatherings consisted of vegetables, fruits, grains, fish and milk.57

Committee for Unified Newark sympathizers were to be careful about what they ate but were simultaneously instructed to avoid being perceived as too interested in dietary practices. They were told, “We are not fanatical about food but the national liberation of our people.”58 The message about food fanaticism may have been designed to distinguish Baraka’s followers from the members of the NOI whose famously rigid dietary rules were well-known in the black community. The confusing admonishment to be concerned but not obsessed about food practices was likely undermined by the number of references to food that appeared in the descriptions of member rituals.

Rites of passage and special holidays were all to be commemorated with specific food practices. On “Leo Baraka,” a community celebration of Amiri Baraka’s birthday, adherents were required to consume only fruit and fruit juice in observance of the day. Watermelon was to be served at the birth of a child, and at the Kuziliwa Karamu (birthday feast) fruit was again to be served along with “natural cakes.”59 Raw fruits and “natural” low-sugar cakes offered a dramatic departure from the flavorful meats, slow-cooked vegetables, and sugary desserts of the soul food tradition. These choices resemble aspects of Gregory’s fruitarian approach and are the outgrowth of similar ideas about health. Similarly, black nutrition guru Alvenia M. Fulton condemned white sugar as unwholesome, forbidding its use under all circumstances in favor of sweeteners such as honey.60

Following the lead established by US, Baraka’s adherents maintained a strict gender hierarchy, and the women in the organization bore the responsibility for cooking and serving food. They performed their tasks under a specific protocol, which stated that men should be fed before women “because respect and appreciation should be given to providers.”61 The CFUN charged women with the task of studying nutrition in order to feed, but not overfeed, their families. The organization’s literature instructed them to prepare meals that were largely vegetarian but could include fish. Nationalist women were warned against encouraging gluttony in their children, being told that overfeeding a child could lead the creation of a “greedy, selfish person.” Character flaws like these could not be tolerated, because the “Nationalist baby has a purpose.”62 Since the health and strength of black children was a shared national asset, members saw the proper feeding of children as a relevant issue for the entire black community.

Unsurprisingly, even outside the domestic sphere women continued to focus their work, at least in part, on food consumption. CFUN leaders instructed nationalist women to pressure school lunch programs to stop serving pork and sugar-coated cereals and to explore the possibility of cooperative food buying within the black community.63 Both the ideas about gender and the beliefs about food embraced by CFUN members resembled some NOI practices, indicating that the Newark nationalist community had likely been influenced by their religious teachings.

In addition, the ideas that the CFUN institutionalized in Newark were similar to those shared by a group of cultural nationalists living in neighboring New York City. The East, a community institution founded in Brooklyn in 1969, included an independent school, a performance space, cooperative businesses, and a newspaper, among other initiatives. Group members were generally in sympathy with the critiques of traditional food habits that had emerged in Newark.64 They rejected the paradigm of southern soul food and created a whole-foods diet that invoked the black diaspora with Swahili expressions. Instructions for feeding children given to the staff of the independent school, Uhura Sasa Shule, give clues as to the nature of the shared dietary rules of The East family. Children were fed meals consisting of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables and were forbidden to eat meat, dairy, or sugary foods.65 Adults, too, had ample opportunity to eat nationalist cuisine. The “Black Experience in Sound” hosted musical performances in an alcohol-free space where patrons could dine on dishes such as Kuumba Rice or East Punch from the popular East kitchen.66 Kawaida Rice, a popular vegetarian dish of brown rice, broccoli, mushrooms, and red and green peppers, drew its name from the term used to describe a distinctive black value system.67

Sales from the popular food served an important function in keeping The East financially afloat, and the success of the health-conscious cuisine inspired offshoot ventures including a catering company. A community-owned bakery showed that although both CFUN and The East were cautious about sugar intake, occasional indulgences were allowed. It served bean pie, a perennial NOI favorite, indicating ties of dietary sympathy between the organizations. However, the inclusion of sweet potato pie on the menu, an item condemned by Elijah Muhammad, signifies the limitations of this culinary convergence and illustrates that most partakers at the cultural nationalist table brought a broad range of dietary influences with them.68 For both the NOI and the members of The East, however, black foods were to be served by and for the black community. The Tamu Sweet-East bakery served food at “black prices,” endeavoring to make culinary manifestations of black culture affordable to the less prosperous in the community and freeing public food consumption from the taint of the capitalist marketplace.69

Members of The East, who referred to themselves as “family,” created a web of interlocking institutions and pledged themselves to mutual cooperation. Like CFUN, they adhered to Kawaida, core beliefs that adherents described as a “faith.”70 This value system was buoyed by many of the mechanisms associated with organized religion, including holidays like Kwanzaa and various written creeds. Male members of The East pledged to abide by the “Brotherhood Code,” which expressed a respect for Kawaida and mental, physical, and spiritual solidarity with the movement. Physical obligations included the vow to “observe dietary rules so that our functions are not hampered by illness.” Eating a whole-foods, vegetarian diet was important to maintain individual wellness and to insure the strength of the entire community. “When we are weak, the Nation shares our weakness.”71 For culinary nationalists, food decisions were a matter of community concern. Healthy black bodies belonged to the nation, they believed, and the failure to obey dietary rules could be seen as a form of community betrayal.