Race, Space and Radical Motherhood in the New Orleans Civil Rights Movement

This paper analyzes black-owned restaurants as gendered institutions and sites of political organizing, considering how women owners and employees exploited assumptions about gendered labor- especially its “nurturing” characteristics- while they quietly helped guide radical change.  Recent accounts of the history of New Orleans civil rights movements have featured restaurant owner Leah Chase and credited her with “feeding” the movement. Indeed, Chase and her assistant Vergie Castle served politicians and activists meeting in a now infamous private “upstairs room” at the Dooky Chase restaurant, where black and white community leaders ignored city statutes prohibiting interracial dining. Reports about meetings of liberal organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People celebrate the deep political ties that made Dooky Chase a community meeting place for political organizing. Far less attention has been paid to meetings in the same room of the Black Nationalist organization Republic of New Afrika, helping to obscure the many ways that black women created space for radical voices in civil rights activism. Although middle-aged mothers like Chase did not identify themselves as radicals at the time, by ignoring segregation laws and subversively supporting radical political movements, women laboring in small family restaurants did what scholars now consider the work of radical organizing. Thus this research contributes to current debates about how we define and periodize radical black activism, and women’s historical contributions to it.