← The Bright Lion Podcast
The Bright Lion Podcast
The Bright Lion Podcast: EP 18 - Southern Fried chicken
00:20:19
Welcome to Season 2 of The Bright Lion Podcast, hosted by SSG Bright, where bold conversations, powerful stories, and lionhearted leadership ignite the spirit of courage, community, and purpose.Today’s episode:Southern Fried Chicken We’re diving into...
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- [00:11]
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I was down in the dark down in the dark I looked down in the dark Now I'm living with the truth God broke the chain yeah I'm walking in proof I'm rowing like a lion I ain't playing the same Crouching down on the mic putting fear in his place I'm smelling the freedom I'm smelling the freedom my friend Means I'll never be Slipping a bright line bold with the Bible tag I speak the booth and the truth Leading the pack SSG Bright Bringing light to the fight. Tune in now as we roll through the night Bright Live podcast with SSG Bright. Rich in faith, courageous debate as brave as a lion and I'm telling you not ferocious no doubt don't let me find out I'm smelling the freedom I'm smelling the freedom my friend be dripping Means I never be sipping Bright line bold with Bible attack Speak the truth in the boot Leading it back right.
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Welcome to the Texas Country Girl Cookbook with Cast Iron Skillet cooking for over 100 years written by Dr. Zenobia Bryant Bright. Texas food is one of the best cuisines in the world. A large state and its cuisine has been influenced by a wide range of cultures such as African, Cajun and lots more. Texas history is also connected with Mexico. The reason why she added Texmeth recipes in her book. Moreover, Texas is a cattle country. A lot of those meals involve beef. Texas food is all about the joy of eating and this cookbook will bring joy to your kitchen. The Texas food is all about brisket, beef, spices, chilies and herbs. You will find delicious and authentic Texas meals in her cookbook. The favorite seafood recipe in her Texas cookbook is the Cajun seasoning blend. Every recipe has its own story. She added true Texas meals. Let's dig into the heart of Texas together. Enjoy, enjoy and read the Country Girl Cookbook Texas Style Cooking. Thank you very much. Good day everybody and welcome to the Back to the Bright Line podcast. I'm your host, SSG Bright. So I hope you got a chance to get your drinks. Drinks. Pencil and paper to take notes. Tissues. Get comfortable, relax, strap on your seat belt and hold on tight and keep up because we're going to have a hot time in the old town tonight. Off Rip. I would like to give all praises, honor and glory to the most high and we do so by the way of the light that's shining in the dark. Yeshua Hamashiach all praises. Our topic today, family is that finger licking good Southern fried chicken. As they say in Germany kitchen Southern fried chicken Was built freedom. So southern fried chicken, it built freedom for the negroes because it was an ever running joke. During slavery in America, the west Africans used tickets not just for dinner, but as secret property. They used the eggs for bartering and fried ticket to pay for land. That's when emancipation proclamation finally arrived. Negro women's turned railway stations into kitchen empires Long before corporations cashed in. So how did that story of survival and hustle become America's favorite running racist punchline? The truth got buried and somebody made a profit. Guess who? Let's examine this. Chicken wasn't just a meal. It was a quiet peak, A quiet piece of rebellion on the plantations across the whole south. Chickens were almost the only livestock slaves could claim as their own. Slaveholders might have owned the land, the cotton and the bodies, but they didn't control every bird pecking and scratching in the yard. However, when a chicken got sick or dead chickens, the slaves were left with no choice but to eat it anyhow. Preparing it was a very labor intensive tasks. And someone had to pluck the chicken, clean it thoroughly, cut it to small pieces piece by piece, season it with paprika and other spices, and later fried in a small batch of hot oil. So seasoning and deep frying wasn't just about taste. They were survival tactics. So those birds laid eggs and they got traded for sugar, cloth or medicines, sometime a clutch of eggs. M the difference between going without having a little extra eating, eating out of the pot in the tin pan with your hands, you know, it mattered. So moving right along. Europe didn't invent fried fried chicken. The Scottish, who had their flour and lard, was known for frying fritters without season. But there's a difference between ducking, dunking something in fat and every die and then, you know, getting a little fancy by boiling and roasting various foods. But contrary to that, a very, very, very long time ago. West Africans. The west African communities have been frying chicken and palm oil for centuries before colonization. It was preservation, it was flavor, it was a technique. In places like Senegal, Ghana, Fried chicken wasn't just a cooking method, it was science. The combination of the high heat, oil infused with spices and strategy, seasoning meant food could last longer in hot climates. It was a culinary engineering born from necessity and perfected through generations and brought to the America via the transatlantic slave trade by the enslaved women on the plantation that had the knowledge of seasoning, deep frying, making the chicken crust pop, pop, pop. Enslaved cooks control plantations, kitchens. They managed inventories, created menus, trained younger cooks, the Slaveholders households depended on their expertise. By the early 1800s, plantation records from a place like monte period Virginia, showing enslaved people selling tickets back to the same folks who claimed to own them. Only a few hands was more than just owning. A few hands was more than just pride. It was property. In a world where nothing else belonged to you, bills of sales were rare as they are, you know, so the bill of sales, they will tell the stories of women buying freedom piece by piece, bird by bird. Even when the laws like The South Carolina 1834 ban tried to strip away this little small power that we had just got, our ancestors have just got. And they found ways, our ancestors, to keep the coops hidden and, you know, and the trade, they kept the trade alive. Fried chicken just wasn't about food. It was currency, inheritance, and one stubborn taste of control. Train whistles cut through the morning on those platforms. And on those platforms, black women turned fried chicken into a ticket out of poverty. In virginia towns, they lined the rails with baskets and metal carriers calling out chicken, chicken, hot biscuits as the train cost. Soul will stop. These were not just snacks. They were box meals wrapped in newspaper or cloth, hustle through train windows, through hungry trap to hungry travelers who had nowhere else to buy a hot meal. Therefore, at the time, fried chicken was only eaten by people on special occasions. This delicious southern fried chicken undoubtedly made their special occasion more special and memorable. So the carriers were not waiting for anybody's permission. They woke up early, before dawn, butchered birds from backyard coops, and fried them up crisp in cast iron pots. Some days, a car, a carrier, could pocket about 5 to 10 to $20, a small fortune when a week's worth wages for black labor barely broke $3. Orange county records from the late 1800s show black women black buying plots of land, building homes, sending their children to school, all off the back of one sizzling drumstick. A sharp piece of business mind they built. They built networks, too. In gordonville, georgia, Gordonville, Virginia alone, dozens of family depended on the chicken trade, Sharing recipes, pooling resources, and guarding that turf at the depot. The fried chicken hustle was not just about feeling bellies. It was about showing up in public, making money on their own terms, and letting the world know that black hands could build wealth, not just serve it. The smell of fried chicken at the station was not just hunger. It was independence. In the air, in the open air, fried chicken was being sold to travelers across the south in train stations, roadsides and street corners. It was profitable, Profitable. It didn't spoil. And it was one of the few foods that they could sell and actually keep the money from it. Black women built customer loyalty, so passengers, passengers sought them out. Specifically, historical accounts from travelers mention these women by name, by reputation. Make sure you get the ticket from Ms. Cora and Aunt Sarah at the atlanta train station or the woman at the Charlotte platform makes the best you ever taste. And fried chicken became associated with black vendors because they own the market. Not because of stereotype, but because of dominance. They were, they were not employees. They were created with their daughters and their granddaughters, what we now call family businesses. Black women essentially created America's first fast food fast food industry. Decades before McDonald's generations, before fast food trucks became part of everyday life, they identified as a market need. Travelers wanted hot ready food to eat and they fulfilled in it. In each city, like Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans and Richmond, Black women dominated street food sales. But there's but there. Here's one thing about America's history When black people, so called black people, build something valuable. The narrative changed quickly. By the turn of the 20th century, fried chicken had moved from the kitchen to the stage. Mitchell shows packed the ages with jokes about black folks and chicken, Turning a symbol of survival into a punchline for white amusement. But the real business was not happening in print. Postcards. That's what was happening at so the real business was happening in print. Postcard publishers like detroit publishing and turk Kurt pitt turned out turned out millions of cars plastered with wide eyed greenhead granny bars, Clutching drumstick and licking greasy fingers, Creating features and mannerism to create a comical, a comical or gross effect. These was not just harmless jokes. They were sold as numerous novelties snapped up by tourists and mailed across every on everything from restaurant signs to flower sacks. The message was loud and clear that on plantation, black people, not black people, were not cooks or entrepreneurs. They were gluttonous children who could not control themselves around a plate of chicken and watermelon. This was not about taste. It was about control. A black woman built businesses and communities off the back of cast iron skillets. These images worked overtime to flatten that pride into a joke and profit off of it. The ridicule left the stage and landed in every mailbox, every roadside dinner, every main street winner window. Even before Hollywood picked up on the picked up the baton. The damage was already done on postcards one at a time. Hollywood did not just pick up the fried chicken joke. It put it on the big screen, stamped it as fact and sold it to a whole country. By 1915, the film the Birth of a Nation by W.D. griffin rolled out a scene that stuck like grease. A black legislator. A black legislator in the South Carolina state House, feet on the desk, knowing on fried chicken, where lawmakers looked on in disgust. That was not a throwaway gag. Studios memos from the time called it common relief, a way to keep the white audience laughing. Even in the middle of the a political drama, the message was clear. The black ambition was still a joke, no matter the setting. Movie after movie, that image kept showing up. Studios and studios like MGM Grand, Warner Brothers, they left fried ticket scenes in that script even when the census questioned the taste because it could be considered stereotypical. But instead, the production notes talked about authenticity and audience expectations. As if black folks cannot be shown without a drumstick in their hand. Cartoons join in turning the stereotype into a running gag for generations of kids. What started as a dig on the postcard became a punchline in every theater, every Saturday matinee. By the 1940s, the joke was so common the dominant audience stop seeing it as a joke at all. That that is when a stereotype stops being a story and starts being a rule. And Hollywood made sure that that rule stuck. And you knew the rule. By the time that Harlan Sanders started slapping his white suit on billboards, fried chicken had already been stripped of his roots and sold back to the world as a southern fantasy. He was not the first to cash in, but he was the one who who turn a back row seat, a back row recipe into a global brand. Kfc. Red and white buckets rolled out across the country in the 1960s with corporate memos quietly circling what they called urban neighborhoods, code for black communities. While white suburbs got steakhouses and salad bars. Franchise maps from the era show fried chicken chains club clustering three times denser in black districts than anywhere else. The flavor stayed black, but the money flows straight to the white pockets, making them very prosperous. Convenience came with a cost. Health records out of Detroit and Atlanta in the 1970s tracked a spike in heart disease and diabetes. Where fast food chains set up shop in zip codes. Black residents face cardiovascular death rates 25% higher than the city city average. Planners called it progress. The numbers called it something else. All that branding, all that zoning, and a whole generation left with fewer choices and a heavier bill. This doctor here, Dr. Psych Williams forcing calls it building houses out of chicken legs. She means it's literally. She meant it literally and figuratively. Black women took fried chicken from survival food to a foundation for family, business and self respect. Her research shows how a recipe passed down in whispers became A tool for buying house, homes, houses, sending kids to school and carving out independence in a world built to shut black folks down. Where the world saw a stereotype, Dr. Williams Forson saw strategy. She documented how chicken money built whole neighborhoods, how recipes traveled from rail station to kitchen, and how dignity got folded into every crispy piece. Michael Twitty carries that torch today. He cooks with his ancestors, hand writing and teaching about the roots of soul food on television, in books and online. Twitty breaks down the real story, how fried chicken is about resourcefulness, not ridicule. He walks fields where his people once labored, frying chicken as an act of remembrance and reclamation. This is not nostalgia, it is a challenge. Know where your food come from, who built it, and who is still fighting for the right to own the story. That's how you take back what was never a joke in the first place. So today America still eats the story. It refuses to face every bit of fried chicken characters, taste of invention and reclamation served hot at every level of culture. The question is not who profit but who controls the narrative. What is on your plate is never just food. Let that sink in. So and the so called black women stand up for another one. An exceptional, innovative piece of historical originality. Well, thanks for riding with me. Going back down south in hopes of educating the kids born yesterday, the people who got Stockholm syndrome, or the people that can't hear that well, can't hear that well and always sit in the back of the classroom in order to remind us not to forget the sharp business mind that energized, revitalized and stimulated it. The chicken bird by bird, piece by piece, perfecting those crisp, sizzling hot recipes that made the fried chicken sing. Until next time everybody. Sssg SSG Shalom.