History of Soul Food Timeline

Thomas Downing was born enslaved in 1791 on Chincoteague Island, on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. He would go on to become one of America's most celebrated Black restaurateurs.

Image source: Thomas Downing (restaurateur)

Sylvia Woods was born in Hemingway, South Carolina in 1926. She later moved to Harlem and became famous as the owner of one of New York City's most iconic soul food restaurants.

Image source: Sylvia Woods

In 1936, an African American postal worker from Harlem named Victor Hugo Green created The Green Book for Black people to travel safely in the Southern United States, where Jim Crow laws were widespread. It listed restaurants and lodgings safe for Black travelers.

Image source: The Negro Motorist Green Book

Atlanta's oldest black-owned restaurant, the Evelyn Jones Cafe, was founded in 1936 by Evelyn Jones and her sister, becoming an enduring institution of Southern soul food dining.

In 1954, Sylvia Woods changed jobs and started working at Johnson's Luncheonette located in central Harlem, beginning her path toward restaurant ownership.

Image source: Sylvia's Restaurant of Harlem

Swett's opened in 1954 and was listed in The Green Book, providing safe dining for Black travelers during the Jim Crow era.

Image source: John Swett

Club from Nowhere was a black-owned soul food restaurant that opened in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, operated by civil rights activist Georgia Gilmore. It helped fund the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Image source: Georgia Gilmore

Seven years after starting at Johnson's Luncheonette, Sylvia Woods and her husband purchased it and reopened it as a soul food restaurant in 1962, calling it Sylvia's Restaurant. It became known as the 'Queen of Soulfood.'

Before King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, he ate at the Four Way restaurant and had fried catfish and lemon icebox pie.

Image source: Four Seasons Restaurant

The earliest cookbook by a Black author was self-published in 1866 by Malinda Russell as a pamphlet titled A Domestic Cookbook: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen.

Image source: Malinda Russell

One recipe for barbecued squirrels that might have been similar to the way slaves cooked them was given in an 1879 cookbook, instructing cooks to put them in the oven and let them cook until done.

Formerly enslaved cook Abby Fisher published Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking in 1881, one of the earliest and most important cookbooks documenting Southern cooking traditions.

A cookbook published in 1900 in the city of Charleston, South Carolina had recipes used by formerly enslaved Gullah people, preserving their distinctive culinary heritage.

Good Things to Eat was published in 1911; the author, Rufus Estes, was a former slave who worked for the Pullman railway car service and became a renowned chef.

Image source: Rufus Estes

Gullah Geechee chef Emily Meggett was born on Edisto Island, South Carolina in 1922. She learned how to farm and cook from her family and became the matriarch of Edisto Island Gullah cuisine.

Another early and influential soul food cookbook is Vertamae Grosvenor's Vibration Cooking, or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl, originally published in 1970, focused on South Carolina Lowcountry/Geechee/Gullah cooking.

Image source: Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor

Historian John Blassingame's book published in 1972, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, was researched from a collection of slave narratives and shed light on the food culture of enslaved people.

Image source: John W. Blassingame

Edna Lewis, a celebrated traditional Southern chef and author, released a series of books between 1972 and 2003, including A Taste of Country Cooking in which she weaves stories of her childhood in Freetown, Virginia into her recipes for 'real Southern food'.

Image source: Edna Lewis

In 2011, culinary historian Jessica B. Harris published High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America, tracing African American food history from Africa through slavery to the present day. Her book later became a docuseries on Netflix in 2021.

Image source: Jessica B. Harris

In 2018 African American author and culinary historian Michael Twitty published The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South about the history, development, and evolution of soul food in Black communities in the Southern United States.

Image source: Michael W. Twitty

Chris Carter is an African American pastor and professor of history who published a book about the Black Church and soul food in 2021 titled, The Spirit of Soul Food: Race, Faith, and Food Justice.

Emily Meggett published a book about Gullah cuisine in 2022 titled, Gullah Geechee Home Cooking: Recipes from the Matriarch of Edisto Island, sharing recipes learned from her family over generations.

Image source: Emily Meggett

One of the earliest written uses of the term 'soul food' is found in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which was published in 1965, helping popularize the name for this African American culinary tradition.

Image source: The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Juneteenth celebrations commemorate June 19, 1865, when Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and announced the end of slavery. These celebrations became a national holiday under the Biden Administration in 2021, often featuring traditional soul foods like barbecue and red drinks.

Image source: Juneteenth

Jessica B. Harris's book became a docuseries in 2021 on Netflix called High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America. Chef Lakisha Harris starred in the series and traveled to Benin, West Africa, where she saw women making a leafy sauce called feuille, prepared similarly to how African Americans cook collard greens.

In 2024, Lakisha Harris became the first Black woman in the United States to give a presentation on soul food at the American Culinary Federation (ACF) National Convention, titled Culinary Freedom of the Soul.

Image source: Soul food