How Butter Pecan Ice Cream Became A Black Staple

ice cream on a wooden board
Via Wikimedia Commons
Briona Lamback
July 2, 2024

The Jim Crow South was a dangerous place for our people, full of laws and customs to keep us from living in the country we built. But this food restriction was the most bizarre.

Black people were denied vanilla ice cream every day except July 4th. This is ironic considering an  enslaved man, Edmond Albius,  revolutionized the cultivation of vanilla, in the first place.

Maya Angelou wrote, "People in Stamps used to say that the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn't buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July 4th. Other days he had to be satisfied with chocolate." Many chose butter pecan instead, and now it's a staple for us.

Poet Audre Lorde appears to co-sign the foolish practices around ice cream.  When her parents tried to treat her to vanilla ice cream at a soda shop during a family trip, the waitress refused them service. She wrote, "The waitress was white, the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington DC that summer when I left childhood was white...".

See, the thing is, anti-Blackness is a way for them to assert oppression even as senseless “rules.” It's time for us to imagine a butter pecan world where we center our culture.

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