A Feast of Reconciliation and Fellowship

Before guests arrive at McCrady's Restaurant, Chef Kevin Mitchell checks the arrangements in the Long Room.

Five years ago I attended an amazing event — and after a five-year-long reflection I can now write about it. It was that profound. Held in Charleston, SC, on April 19, 2015, it has become known as Nat Fuller’s Feast.

Guests at Nat Fuller's Feast get comfortable before the dinner program begins.

Original Dinner

It commemorated and celebrated the original dinner held by Fuller, a newly freed African-American chef, to mark the end of the American Civil War and of slavery. Charleston, the epicenter of secession, had surrendered to Union forces on February 18, 1865, and their occupation liberated the approximately 10,000 slaves who had remained there.

Chef B.J. Dennis brings out a tray of hors d'oeuvres at the reception.

To a feast of his making in his restaurant, Fuller invited prominent citizens, blacks and whites, as his guests. Historian David Shields identifies the significance of the occasion: “Here’s a man who realizes that because of the abolition of slavery ... there’s going to be a new ground of social relationships.”

Prof. David Shields (right) with a re-enactor of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment at the reception.

Abby Louisa Porcher, a grande dame of the Charleston planter society, described the feast this way: “Nat Fuller, a Negro caterer, provided munificently for a miscegenat dinner, at which blacks and whites sat on an equality and gave toasts and sang songs for Lincoln and Freedom.”

A table display at the reception with a portrait by artist Jonathan Green to communicate the spirit of Nat Fuller (although no pictures of Fuller have been found).

The 2015 event also recognized the significant role that free and enslaved African-Americans played in shaping Charleston's cuisine in the mid-nineteenth and until World War I. Before being emancipated, Fuller had been an enslaved cook, caterer, marketer of game, and restaurateur, and he was the foremost private chef in the antebellum city. As described by Shields, Fuller was “one citizen who sought to turn the hearts and minds of the public to the future, to teach Charlestonians the values requisite in the new post-bellum world.”

Advertisement in the Charleston Courier on June 12, 1855 by Nat Fuller, who saved money for his catering business by working as the city's chief marketer of game (courtesy of American Historical Newspapers).

Reconciliation Renewed

Shields chaired Nat Fuller’s Feast in an attempt to re-create the 1865 meal as part of the city’s Civil War sesquicentennial. Chef Kevin Mitchell of the Culinary Institute of Charleston served as host. Chef B.J. Dennis, a Gullah-Geechee culinary specialist; nationally noted chef Sean Brock (formerly of McCrady’s and Husk); and Mitchell prepared the food with the assistance of many others.

I enjoyed meeting Natalie Dupree, the Queen of Southern Cuisine, who is an esteemed chef, cooking show host and author of 14 cookbooks.

The evening began with a reception in The Charleston Renaissance Gallery, a fine arts gallery where Bachelor’s Retreat, Fuller’s restaurant renowned for its pastries and its roasted game and meats at 78 Church Street (now 103 Church Street), had been located. Hors d’oeuvres — brioche with foie gras mousse, strawberry jam and pickled spring onions; benne tart shells with lobster salad and caviar; warm rice bread with smoked tongue and chow chow; chicken and truffle pies — were as remarkable as the cocktails: brandy smash, mint julep, gin with bitters, persimmon beer, carbonated shrubs as well as Nat Fuller’s signature concoctions.

A tray of shells with lobster salad is served at the reception.

During the reception, re-enactors of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an African-American regiment in the Civil War made famous in the movie Glory, sang songs of the era. This regiment had entered Charleston three days after the mayor had surrendered the city to Union troops. After the reception, we were escorted by the re-enactors to the Long Room of McCrady’s Restaurant for the feast. Food prepared as it was in Fuller’s time came out in waves. In the tradition of Fuller’s banquets, Russian-style service brought courses sequentially rather than all at once, and each waiter served small sections of two long dinner tables.

Re-enactors of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment escort the dinner guests from the reception to McCrady's Restaurant.

The Menu

The platters were overflowing:

• Potage: mock turtle soup and oyster soup with celery
• Relishes: mixed pickled vegetables, Bradford watermelon pickles, marinated olives, collard kraut 
• Poisson (fish): fried whiting, shrimp pie, poached bass, Worcestershire anchovy sauce, mushroom ketchup, walnut ketchup, butter caper sauce 
• Volaille (poultry): capon chasseur, aged duck with Seville oranges, partridge with truffle sauce
• Viande (meat): venison with currant demi, lamb chops with mint sauce, beef a la mode 
• Legumes: asparagus, roasted turnips, fresh peas, baby beets, roasted potatoes, Carolina gold rice, potato puree 
• Desserts: Charlotte russe, almond cake, blanc mange, punch cakes, vanilla and pineapple ice creams 

The menu reflects dishes prepared by Nat Fuller in the 1860s.

Several of Fuller’s bills of fare have been preserved. They indicate that he cooked veal more than his peers, liked to fry or poach fish rather than broiling it, and prepared food with mushroom and walnut “catsups” regularly. Near the end of the dinner, Shields led everyone in the toast “To Lincoln and liberty” that was also a part of the 1865 feast.

Two soups, not one, begin the dinner.

Guests

The menu itself conveys a sense of how well-designed and fantastic the evening was, and the 80 who attended included community leaders, historians, scholars, faith leaders, culinarians, artists, writers, and others. In attendance was the great-great-granddaughter of stellar caterer Eliza Seymour Lee, a free black woman, who apprenticed Fuller when he was being trained as a cook. Because Fuller didn’t sell tickets to his 1865 feast, the organizers decided to select the guests — who would not pay for their meal, but receive it as a gift — except for six, who would be winners of an essay contest administered by The Post and Courier, the daily newspaper of Charleston.

My place setting at the dinner.

When I learned about the contest, I was compelled to enter — a chance to participate in an evening of history, food, and racial reconciliation was enticing. Entrants were asked to explain why they belonged at the table by referring to “the ideals of hospitality, culinary community and social justice embodied by Fuller and his feast.” I fortunately was one of the six winners, and a condensed version of my essay was published in The Post and Courier.

Guests are randomly seated at one of the two long tables to stimulate conversation. 

Controversy

In 2018 at a conference hosted by the College of Charleston, Ethan Kytla, a California State University Fresno history professor, refuted the claim that Fuller hosted a reunification banquet in the wake of the Civil War. Nevertheless, the college continues to display its digital exhibit about Fuller and the 2015 dinner.

Baby beets are one of the many vegetables served.

Shields had uncovered details about Nat Fuller and his dinner when researching The Culinarians, a book published by the University of Chicago Press. Although Shields acknowledged to The Post and Courier that his research in documenting the original event was imperfect, he is adamant that “there was a sit-down event where blacks and whites were together.”

A platter of meats is served Russian-style by the team of waiters. Photo: Jonathan Boncek.

Reflection

Six days before the dinner, a video of Walter Scott, an African American, being killed by a white police officer was released that further incited racial tensions caused by the shooting earlier that month. Then two months later nine African Americans, including Rev. Clementa Pinckney, were killed by a white gunman at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church. Pickney, also a state senator, had been one of the guests at Nat Fuller’s Feast.

The dinner was held at McCrady's Restaurant in historic downtown Charleston. 

The controversy about the authenticity of the 1865 event notwithstanding, the 2015 feast still has merit — a gathering of fellowship in the spirit of racial reconciliation. That it occurred in Charleston is so meaningful in light of the tragic loss of lives that spring. Attending Nat Fuller's Feast was an amazing experience and causes me to reflect frequently on its significance.

Each guest received a program about the event and Nat Fuller's life.

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For more information about Nat Fuller’s Feast, see:

• “Nat Fuller’s Feast: The Life and Legacy of an Enslaved Cook in Charleston,” a digital exhibit hosted by the Lowcountry Digital Library of the College of Charleston 
• “Nat Fuller’s Feast” by Shields 
• “A Charleston Feast for Reconciliation,” a podcast by Philip Graitcer for Southern Foodways Alliance (comments excerpted from my interview begins at 17:04) 
• Letter by Chef Mitchell to Chef Fuller that explains the menu ideas and other planning details for the 2015 event.

The reception was held at The Charleston Renaissance Gallery where the Bachelor's Retreat, Fuller's famous restaurant, had been located.

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Note: McCrady's Restaurant closed when the coronavirus pandemic occurred in 2020 and did not reopen.

Schools That Changed Our Region

Rosenwald

How did a wealthy businessman from Chicago become so involved in educating school children in the South almost a century ago?

Increasingly lost in our collective memory is how Julius Rosenwald, president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, teamed up with Booker T. Washington, president of Tuskegee Institute and an African-American leader and philanthropist, to create school after school throughout our region in the early twentieth century.

Washington was known for saying, “If you want to lift yourself up, lift up someone else.” Rosenwald did exactly that.

Rosenwald and Washington in 1915. Photo: University of Chicago Library.

In the segregated school systems of the Jim Crow era, the education of African-American students was woefully inadequate and underfunded. To offset this deficiency, Rosenwald established a fund that provided “seed money” to build almost 5,000 schools for African-Americans in 15 states—those that had joined the Confederacy and several bordering states. More buildings were constructed in North Carolina than any other state—813 were erected here.

Schools built in the Sandhills area of the state tell part of the story:

• Moore County’s surviving Rosenwald-funded school is in Pinebluff. Known as the Lincoln Park School, the one-story, four-teacher building that served Addor and nearby African-American communities. Built in 1922, it still stands at 1272 S. Currant St. Placed on the National Register in 1997, it hasn’t been used as a school for 70 years. In Moore County, a total of 15 Rosenwald schools (serving 50 teachers) were built during 1920-1929. 

Lincoln Park School.

• In Harnett County, 23 Rosenwald schools were built (during 1922-1930 for 73 teachers). Still surviving is a complex of six buildings known as Harnett County Training School that began as a two-story, 14-teacher structure built in 1922. When it opened in Dunn at 610 E. Johnston St., it served first through 11th graders and was the only brick multi-story school for African-Americans in the county. It became one of the largest Rosenwald schools in the state when it was expanded in 1927. Placed on the National Register in 2014, it is one of only three multi-story Rosenwald schools in the state still standing. 

Harnett County Training School.

• In Richmond County, 65 teachers taught in 21 Rosenwald schools, ranging from one- to 10-teacher structures, built during 1918-1930. As many as 17 are no longer identifiable or known to the Richmond County Historical Association; knowledge of them has vanished along with the structures. Still physically surviving is Liberty Hill School at 234 Covington Community Road northwest of Ellerbe that was placed on the National Register in 2008. The building has two classrooms as well as an industrial room where girls learned home economics and boys were trained to use farming tools. The one-story, two-teacher building—built in 1930 when construction of Rosenwald schools was ending in this area—was no longer used as a school by the mid-1950s. 

Liberty Hill School.

In addition to building schools, Rosenwald wanted to promote collaboration among white and black citizens. He required local communities to raise matching funds and white-controlled school boards to operate and maintain the schools.

Interior space of Liberty Hill School.

When the school-building program ended in 1932, the Rosenwald Fund had contributed $4.3 million to improve African-American education in the South. Raising money to match Rosenwald’s donations was not easy for cotton and tobacco tenant farmers in rural communities. The grassroots-fundraising literally collected a penny and a nickel at a time; however, eventually African-Americans in the South contributed $4.7 million. In North Carolina, they contributed more than $666,000 to the program.

The schools were designed very carefully because they originally had no electricity. To maximize natural light, their plans included detailed suggestions for window placement, blackboard location and desk orientation. By 1929, Rosenwald schools served one-third of the South’s rural African-American students and teachers.

Many schools were demolished after the Supreme Court ruling in 1954 that school segregation is unconstitutional. In most areas, these buildings have long decayed, been abandoned and lost in time with little trace of their existence. However, in a few communities, the old schools have found new lives as senior citizen housing, a town hall, community centers, and offices. Others have been preserved by being placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

As late as 2002, the National Trust for Historic Preservation began a campaign to raise awareness and money for protecting Rosenwald schools and named them as being near the top of America’s most endangered places.

The Rosenwald school-building program helped many African-Americans gain an education that otherwise would not have been available. These relics of a painful past are part of American history and very prominent elements of our regional culture. Unfortunately, they continue to decline and become more endangered with each passing year.

Rosenwald once said, “All the other pleasures of life seem to wear out, but the pleasure of helping others in distress never does.” How he helped others will continue to inspire us well into the future.

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Note: The post is based on my article about Rosenwald schools published in the September 2019 issue of OutreachNC Magazine.