Where Did the "Black People Love Fried Chicken" Stereotype Come From?

"My mother paid for this place with chicken legs." In 1970, Bella Winston of Gordonsville, Virginia, said that about the house she was standing in. This is how a 1705 Virginia law left enslaved people one animal, how Black women turned it into the "Fried Chicken Capital of the World," and how the stereotype that followed ended up in the first movie ever shown inside the White House. 0:00 "Paid for with chicken legs" 0:43 Who really cooked it 1:47 The 1705 law 2:56 Gordonsville, Virginia 4:46 The backlash 5:26 The stereotype machine 7:23 A hundred years, same joke 8:45 Still here 9:15 The truth Sources - Virginia, An Act concerning Servants and Slaves (1705), ch. XLIX (Hening's Statutes at Large) - Mary Randolph, The Virginia House-Wife (1824), "Fried Chickens" - Psyche Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (UNC Press, 2006) - NPR / WAMU, "The Fried Chicken Capital: Where Racial Progress Began Along the Rails" (2015) - WVIR 29 News, "The women who made Gordonsville the fried chicken capital of the world" (2025) - Encyclopedia Virginia, "The Economy of the Enslaved in Virginia" - The Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W. Griffith; AFI Catalog; White House screening, Feb. 18, 1915 - Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cakewalk (1898), Will Marion Cook & Paul Laurence Dunbar - Coverage of Fuzzy Zoeller (1997) and Sergio Garcia (2013) remarks: ESPN, AP, Fox News Images and film: Library of Congress, NYPL, Wikimedia Commons (public domain). #blackhistory #history #friedchicken