Soul food is the ethnic cuisine of African Americans. It originated in the American South from the cuisines of enslaved Africans trafficked to the North American colonies through the Atlantic slave trade during the Antebellum period and is closely associated the cuisine of the American South. The expression "soul food" originated in the mid-1960s when "soul" was a common word used to describe African-American culture. Soul food uses cooking techniques and ingredients from West African, Central African, Western European, and Indigenous cuisine of the Americas.
The legal institution of human chattel slavery, comprising the enslavement primarily of Africans and African Americans, was prevalent in the United States of America from its founding in 1776 until 1865, predominantly in the South. Slavery was established throughout European colonization in the Americas. From 1526, during the early colonial period, it was practiced in what became Britain's colonies, including the Thirteen Colonies that formed the United States. Under the law, an enslaved person was treated as property that could be bought, sold, or given away. Slavery lasted in about half of U.S. states until abolition in 1865, and issues concerning slavery seeped into every aspect of national politics, economics, and social custom. In the decades after the end of Reconstruction in 1877, many of slavery's economic and social functions were continued through segregation, sharecropping, and convict leasing.
Sylviane Anna Diouf is a historian and curator of the African diaspora. She is a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University and a member of the Scientific Committee of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. Her contribution as a social historian, she stressed, "May be the uncovering of essential stories and topics that were overlooked or negated, but which actually offer new insights into the experience of the African Diaspora. A scholar said my work re-shapes and re-directs our understanding of this history; it shifts our attention, corrects the historical record, and reveals hidden and forgotten voices."
Living in a wide range of circumstances and possessing the intersecting identity of both black and female, enslaved women of African descent had nuanced experiences of slavery. Historian Deborah Gray White explains that "the uniqueness of the African-American female's situation is that she stands at the crossroads of two of the most well-developed ideologies in America, that regarding women and that regarding the Negro." Beginning as early on in enslavement as the voyage on the middle passage, enslaved women received different treatment due to their gender. In regard to physical labor and hardship, enslaved women received similar treatment to their male counterparts, but they also frequently experienced sexual abuse at the hand of enslavers who used stereotypes of black women’s hypersexuality as justification.
Latasha Harlins was an African-American girl who was fatally shot at age 15 by Soon Ja Du, a 49-year-old Korean American convenience store owner. Du was tried and convicted of voluntary manslaughter over the killing of Harlins, based in part on security camera footage. The judge sentenced Du to 10 years in state prison but the sentence was suspended and the defendant was instead placed on five years' probation with 400 hours of community service and payment of $500 restitution, and Harlins' funeral costs. The sentencing was widely regarded as extremely light, and a failed appeal reportedly contributed to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, especially the targeting of Koreatown. The killing of Harlins came 13 days after the videotaped beating of Rodney King.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America is a 1995 history book about nineteenth century slave children in America by Wilma King. As the first full-length book on the subject, it began the scholarship of slave childhood. The book uses historical documents to argue that enslaved children were deprived of experiences now understood to constitute childhood, due to early work responsibilities, frequent bodily and emotional trauma, and separations from family. The book covers themes of the children's education, leisure, religion, transitions to freedmen, and work expectations. It was published in the Indiana University Press's Blacks in the Diaspora series, and a revised edition was released in 2011.
Deborah Gray White is the Board of Governors Professor of History and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. In addition to teaching at Rutgers, she also directed, "The Black Atlantic: Race, Nation and Gender", a project at The Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis from 1997 to 1999. Throughout 2000-2003 she was the chair of the history department at Rutgers. White has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship, the Carter G. Woodson Medallion for excellence in African American history, and has also received an Honorary Doctorate from her undergraduate alma mater, Binghamton University. She currently heads the Scarlet and Black Project which investigates Native Americans and African Americans in the history of Rutgers University.
The History of slavery in Michigan includes the pro-slavery and anti-slavery efforts of the state's residents prior to the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865.
Jessica Millward is an American historian who focuses on African American history, early America, African diaspora, slavery, and gender. Her work focuses on the female slave experience by emphasizing narratives of black women during slavery.
Edwin Epps was a slaveholder on a cotton plantation in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. He was the third and longest enslaver of Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. in 1841 and forced into slavery. On January 3, 1853, Northup left Epps's property and returned to his family in New York.
Tera Hunter is an American scholar of African-American history and gender. She holds the Edwards Professor of American History Endowed Chair at Princeton University. She specializes in the study of gender, race, and labor in the history of the Southern United States.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an American historian. She is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. She is an expert in African-American history, the history of American slavery, and women's and gender history.
Ariela Julie Gross is an American historian. Previously the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law (USC), she is now a Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law.
Jeff Forret is an American historian and professor at Lamar University.
A Love Song for Latasha is a 2019 American biographical documentary short film directed by Sophia Nahli Allison. Drawing on memories from the subject's cousin and best friend, the film reimagines the life of Latasha Harlins, a Black Los Angeles girl shot and killed by a convenience store owner in 1991. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject at the 93rd Academy Awards.
Sasha Deborah Turner is a Jamaican-American historian who is an associate professor of history of at the Johns Hopkins University Department of the History of Medicine. Her research considers the history of the Caribbean, with a particular focus on enslavement and colonialism. She is co-president of the Coordinating Council for Women in History.
Sophia Nahli Allison is an American documentary filmmaker and photographer. Her documentary short A Love Song for Latasha (2019) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. It debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival and screened at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020. Allison directed and co-wrote the 2021 HBO Max special Eyes on the Prize: Hallowed Ground.
Nikki M. Taylor is an American historian. She is professor of history at Howard University and author of four books on nineteenth-century African-American history.
Slave marriages in the United States were typically illegal before the American Civil War abolished slavery in the U.S. Enslaved African Americans were legally considered chattel, and they were denied civil and political rights until the United States abolished slavery with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Both state and federal laws denied, or rarely defined, rights for enslaved people.
