Menu for an Atlanta restaurant with offensive name

I don’t usually buy so-called Black Americana items because the images are so maddening. But I was drawn to a Wednesday, Sept. 9, 1959, menu for Mammy’s Shanty, once a popular southern restaurant in Atlanta.

The city was truly a scion of the South back then, but you wouldn’t know that if you’d visit today. A friend of mine who grew up in Florida and lived in Washington, DC, for a while recently settled into a suburb of the city. She’s among the 54 percent of African Americans – many of them middle-class – who make up the population of a city that once reeked of Jim Crowism.

So it was with reluctance that I decided to bid on the menu with all of its baggage, primarily because of its historical value and my love for old diners – even if this one would not have seated me so long ago.

The cover of the menu bore none other than an African American woman with a kerchief on her head. It was in shades of brown, but I’m sure that if it were in primary colors, this woman would have had the stereotypical red lips, and red and white kerchief.

In fact, I later found on eBay a menu from Sunday, July 30, 1950, in color with a character drawn as black women were falsely depicted at that time. I also found on the web some postcards, a shot glass, a children’s menu, placemat, matchbook with matches, match cover, a 1957 menu with the Confederate flag and an ashtray.

The images on each of these items – the ones on the children’s menu were the worse – were what you’d expect from a restaurant with a Pickaninny Coffee Shop and Pappy’s Plantation Lounge, which could also be a nod to old white male southerners. The menu’s offerings were trademark diner, and the look of the menu itself was similar to countless diner menus you’d see today.

On the cover, the menu touted “The Worlds Best Pecan Pie.” Inside were smaller menus for drinks (Sherman’s Drive, 80 cents;  Scarlett O’Hara, 90 cents; Tobacco Road, $1); summer coolers, not drinks but light meals, and a Florida lobster platter for $4.25. Also inside were six unused postcards promoting dishes at the shanty, which was recommended by Duncan Hines. This was in reference to the actual man of the cake-mix empire who compiled a list of his favorite eating places starting in 1935. The restaurant apparently was also AAA rated.

One of the postcards featured a chicken shortcake for $1.65 with this syrupy ole-boy description:

“When crinoline and hoop skirts were in vogue and Jean LaFitte was pirateering around New Orleans, it wasn’t gold he was looking for. No suh, he was looking for a Natchez Negro Mammy who could make Chicken Shortcake. This old recipe has been handed down as it was in the Good Old Days.”

I’m sure the folks cooking this dish in the kitchen were black, although they couldn’t sit in the dining room to eat. In fact, the restaurant noted in several places that “we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”

Mammy’s Shanty was located on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, and presumably was also a meeting place for local businesses. It thrived in a city that, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was not unlike many other towns and cities of the South. One resident writing years later noted that it was much the same as it was before WWII. Drive 40 miles outside of Atlanta, he wrote, and you’d be in farmland. Another noted that among its mainstays were two major department stores, Rich’s and Davison’s, and on Saturday nights, the downtown area was deserted.

But whites found their way to Mammy’s Shanty and Johnny Rebs, two of the southern-style restaurants in town. Black women who waited on tables were forced to wear head scarves and wooden name tags around their neck, according to one writer’s recollections.

The shanty was apparently one of several restaurants modeled after another one called Aunt Fanny’s Cabin, founded in 1941 outside Atlanta, whose black waiters had to wear signs around their necks bearing the menu. One of the copiers, Pittypat’s Porch, ironically located on the renamed Andrew Young International Blvd., is still around. On its walls, next to photos of such southern segregationists as Gov. Lester Maddox are those of civil rights icon U.S. Rep. John Lewis and Maynard Jackson, the city’s first black mayor, according to one diner who wrote about the experience for Atlanta magazine.

As a Georgia native, I don’t remember the names of either of these restaurants, but I do recall the mean and hateful Lester Maddox, who brandished an ax handle to chase away three black folks trying to enter his restaurant in light of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Maddox later became governor of Georgia, and I always saw him as the George Wallace of my state. May he not rest in peace.

Like its counterparts, the shanty defied the burgeoning civil rights laws and the movement that was taking hold in the South. In the early 1960s, when President Kennedy wrote the civil rights act, the restaurant seemed to have been one of the few “public accommodations” claiming to be engaging in voluntary desegregation. In actuality, it and they were not.

Civil rights activists tried to maintain a list of “integrated establishments,” but the list kept changing at the whims of the restaurant and hotel owners. When blacks showed up, they found that they may or may not be seated. In one example, a black woman and her white co-worker in September 1963 were told that Mammy’s Shanty was on the list. When they arrived, the hostess stopped them at the door and soon asked them to leave without seating them. They were also turned away at other restaurants, including one where they had previously dined.

James Earl Ray, convicted of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, apparently found the shanty a welcoming place to dine, doing so at least twice that year. He told investigators probing the slaying of King that he had met with a man named Raoul, whom he was was the real shooter, prior to the assassination. Ray had a receipt for a London broil dinner for two at the restaurant. He also had a lunch receipt for $1.81 dated April 9, 1968.

The shanty closed in 1971, followed by most others like it. Those regulars from the 1950s wouldn’t recognize the city now. Millionaire Tyler Perry has his studios there, steadily turning out movies and TV shows, some of which are as bothersome as the shanty menu. The singer Usher has a home there. More than 50 years ago, they wouldn’t have been allowed to sit down for the shanty’s Chicken Shortcake. Today, they could buy the restaurant and much much more.