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No Vanilla Ice Cream for Negroes? History versus Folklore
In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 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 Fourth. Other days he had to be satisfied with chocolate.
Some people — including a writer for the Guardian newspaper — think Angelou was sharing a fact. They misunderstand what’s meant by “used to say” — it was a grim joke: “How racist were the people in Stamps? They were so racist a Negro could only buy vanilla ice cream on the fourth of July.”
In the Jim Crow South, some white businesses refused to serve black people and most had special conditions for black customers: order at the back door, eat in the back yard, use the “colored” wash room, watch movies in the balcony, etc.
But there’s no evidence vanilla ice cream was forbidden to anyone. White business people were business people first. They sold white products like milk and bread and ice cream to black people because black people’s money was green.
Folklore is never about what’s historically true. It’s about what’s emotionally true, so black people joked that a Negro couldn’t even buy vanilla ice cream where they grew up. Humor has always been a survival tactic for people in hard times.
