The recent invasion of Chicago area restaurants and cafés by Immigration and Customs Enforcement is inspiring owners and workers to revive the Civil Rights-era playbook of Black-owned restaurants to fight back.
From Logan Square to Bridgeport, restaurant and café owners, along with citizens, have joined the picket lines against ICE as Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order prohibiting federal agents from carrying out operations on all city property, declaring them an “ICE-free zone.”
Signs on one front door read: “Everyone is welcome, except ICE.”
But the idea of a restaurant/café as a place of shelter in times of social and political struggle is not new. It is a strategy at the heart of the Civil Rights-era playbook of Black restaurants in the South, including becoming a cornerstone in the system of Black eateries that served as safe havens for activists, such as Peaches in Jackson, Miss., and Paschal’s in Atlanta, Ga. At the forefront of these efforts was the James Beard Award-winning Dooky Chase’s in New Orleans, La.
In the 1960s, James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award-winning Black chef Leah Chase converted the narrow upstairs room of Dooky Chase’s into a sanctuary for the city’s civil rights movement. While patrons ate downstairs, activists assembled in the room, hidden from the public.
Founded in 1941, Dooky Chase’s was originally a sandwich shop concept created by Chase’s father and mother-in-law, Emily and Dooky Chase Sr. By the 1950s, however, Chase expanded the shop into a fine dining restaurant, making it one of the first Black-owned restaurants of its kind in the nation.
Known as the “Queen of Creole Cuisine,” Chase allowed activists, advocates, and community members in organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to find refuge in the upstairs dining room to conduct strategy sessions or simply catch their breath over a hot bowl of gumbo.
“They would come here, and we would feed them, and they would plan all their meetings,” Chase once stated, author Janet Dewart Bell reported in her 2020 book, Lighting The Fires Of Freedom: African American Women in The Civil Rights Movement. “When I think back, in some ways, we changed the course of America over a bowl of gumbo,” Chase reportedly said.
Dooky Chase’s list of patrons included prominent African Americans such as local civil rights attorney Lolis Elie, who worked tirelessly to help desegregate the Louisiana; the Supreme Court’s first Black justice, Thurgood Marshall, and national civil rights leader and 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
These public figures recognized Dooky Chase’s as a command center for civil rights efforts from the streets of “The Big Easy” to the halls of the nation’s capital.
Freedom Riders, both Black and white, fled to Dooky Chase’s to escape the taunts and violence of white mobs as they arrived in the city to end their dangerous public demonstration against racialized segregation in interstate travel.
Defying common state segregation laws that prohibited Black and white people from eating in the same place, Dooky Chase’s provided the riders with Creole dishes like Jambalaya as they took the time to exhale and reflect.
Similarly, Dooky Chase’s was the only upscale restaurant where Black celebrities such as Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, and Quincy Jones could dine when they traveled to New Orleans.
Even after the movement ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act became law, Dooky Chase’s evolved into a national global destination for dignitaries, including former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. To this day, Dooky Chase’s remains a Black cultural icon of fine dining despite the passing of Leah Chase in 2019.
In reflecting on the restaurant in relation to the struggle for civil rights, Chase said, “I didn’t think I was doing anything brave. I just thought I was doing what I was supposed to do.”
This conviction to act as a restaurant during times of racial conflict reverberates today. Although the chaos of ICE actions today is not exactly similar, and separated by roughly 1,000 miles and several decades, there are parallels.
Then and now, restaurants inserted themselves into social struggle—carving out their own space to make a difference. The spaces provided a much-needed reprieve for those who needed protection or a place where communities can come together without the fear of being terrorized.
As ICE continues to cause chaos across Chicago and suburbs, the resistance of the restaurants and cafés in the city reminds us of the successful resistance by Black-owned restaurants decades ago. History taught this lesson, and tragically, it needs to be in place again.