How did a story of hot chicken become a story about shifting philosophies of urban planning? Those sorts of holes pockmark all of American history.Ĭhapter 16: Another thread of your book is real estate, redlining, and urban renewal. But there are giant holes in what I was able to know. From those clues, I could use maps and other clues to reconstruct a bit of his life. Thornton Prince III, the first proprietor of the business that became Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack, often disappeared even from those, but when I could find his name, I could piece together where he lived and where he worked. The most important and reliable documents I had were the Nashville city directories. This purposefully spotty record keeping made researching this book much harder. Only 7 of those businesses were included in the city’s directory. In May 1940, The Nashville Globe, the local Black-owned newspaper, published a list of 41 Black-owned restaurants in the city. ![]() But too many of their names and their stories have disappeared.Įven after emancipation, Black Americans were omitted from the records the nation created. Enslaved philosophers and enslaved inventors revolutionized the nation. Enslaved artists crafted new forms of expression. Enslaved cooks enlivened the American diet and nourished generations of bodies. Most have been forgotten.Įnslaved engineers built our cities. Others pop up as a passing reference in a white slave owner’s accounts. Some of their names are preserved in the memories of their enslaved family members. Enslaved people were not listed by name in the census records. In the pre-Civil War era, this meant that many people living in America went literally unrecorded. ![]() As a result, one of the easiest ways to maintain the inequalities that have structured our nation’s past was to control whose stories entered the history books and whose lives were documented in our archives. The story we tell ourselves about our past shapes who we are today and who we will become in the future. Rachel Louise Martin: History is a powerful element in our society. How difficult was it for you to find information about them and to separate the hot chicken legend from reality? ![]() Rachel Louise Martin answered questions from Chapter 16 via email.Ĭhapter 16: One thread of this book is a family history of the Princes, the storied creators of hot chicken. But acknowledging its creators and the long odds they faced is an important first step. “When hot chicken left the neighborhood, it did so without taking its progenitors with it.”Ī shared love of a fiery soul-food staple might not be enough to heal a city’s centuries-old divisions, Martin admits. “Systemic racism meant that hot chicken stayed in a corner of Nashville for almost seventy years before it exploded into the rest of the city,” writes Martin. To Martin, the story of Nashville hot chicken is the story of America itself - of how our race-based caste system has shaped our institutions, our food, and our urban landscapes and the ways those forces have made it so hard for Black entrepreneurs to profit from their own creative endeavors. A trained historian and dogged researcher, she responded with a deep dive into the shifting Nashville map - successive waves of Black gatherings and displacements, from Civil War refugee settlements to urban renewal schemes, tornadoes and floods, suburban flight and gentrification. The question burned its way into Martin’s head and wouldn’t let go. She wondered why that was and had a suspicion she knew the answer. In the introduction to Hot, Hot Chicken, Rachel Louise Martin marvels that most white Nashvillians of her generation - herself included - grew up knowing nothing about hot chicken, now Nashville’s signature dish and a global phenomenon.
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