The Labor Day Cookout: A Field Guide to the Plate

The last one of the season. Make it count.

Labor Day weekend is the closing ceremony. Everybody knows it. The pool's about to close, the school year already started, and this is the last legitimate excuse to stand outside in somebody's backyard until the streetlights come on.

So the plate matters. And every single thing on that plate has a paper trail.

First: Labor Day Is Not Just A Day Off

The federal holiday came in 1894, signed by President Grover Cleveland in the middle of the Pullman Strike — a labor peace offering more than a celebration.

Here's the part that usually gets left out. Plenty of the early unions that Labor Day was created to honor wrote Black workers out of their constitutions. So Black workers built their own.

The Pullman Company was one of the largest employers of Black men in the country, hiring them as porters on luxury sleeping cars — brutal hours, low wages, income that depended on the mood of a white passenger and whether he felt like tipping. In 1925, A. Philip Randolph was elected president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first all-Black labor union in the United States. It took them more than a decade of fighting to win recognition and a contract from Pullman.

Those porters also carried Black newspapers down the rail lines into towns that couldn't get them any other way, which is part of how the Great Migration got its information.

So when we cook out on Labor Day, we're not borrowing somebody else's holiday. We have receipts.

The Barbecue

America's first pitmasters were enslaved people. Slow-cooking meat over open fire and preserving it with smoke are West and West Central African techniques that got carried here and became the foundation of an entire national cuisine that mostly forgot to credit them.

And barbecue was central to the first Juneteenth celebrations. When word of emancipation reached Galveston in June 1865, the gatherings that followed were built around the pit — goat in parts of Texas, whole hog in others, beef somewhere else, depending on what was local.

The cookout was reclamation before it was tradition. That's not a small thing to know while you're standing in line for ribs.

Regionally, this is a whole map:

Carolinas run vinegar and pepper on whole hog, with the mustard belt cutting through South Carolina. Memphis is dry rub and pork ribs. Texas is beef and brisket with the rub doing the talking. Kansas City is thick, sweet, tomato-heavy sauce on everything. And Alabama has that white sauce — mayonnaise and vinegar on smoked chicken — which sounds wrong to everybody who hasn't had it and correct to everybody who has.

The Red Drink

It's not just "the red one." Red drinks trace back to West African hibiscus infusions — bissap, sorrel — and kola nut, both of which brew deep red and both of which traveled with the people who were taken from those places.

Red carried meaning: remembrance, sacrifice, celebration. Which is why red drink anchors Juneteenth tables and why the cooler at every cookout has something red in it whether anybody at that cookout could explain why or not.

Now it shows up as red Kool-Aid, red soda, hibiscus tea, or somebody's grandmother's sorrel recipe. Same lineage, different century.

The Watermelon

Eat it. Out loud. On the porch.

After emancipation, freed Black people grew, sold, and ate watermelon — it was cheap to farm, easy to sell, and it became a genuine symbol of freedom and self-sufficiency. That is precisely why it got twisted into a racist caricature. The stereotype exists because the fruit represented Black independence and somebody needed to poison that.

Knowing that turns a plate of watermelon into a small act of taking something back.

The Potato Salad Situation

We all understand the rules. Let's just say them.

Not everybody is cleared to bring potato salad. There is a shortlist, the shortlist was determined years ago by people who are no longer with us, and it is not currently accepting applications.

Raisins are a disqualifying offense. So is a texture that suggests the potatoes were boiled by somebody in a hurry. The paprika on top is not seasoning, it is a signature — it tells you who made it before you taste it.

If you were not asked to bring potato salad, bring ice. Ice is honorable work. Somebody always forgets ice.

Everything Else On The Plate

Macaroni and cheese — not a side. A separate institution. Baked, sliceable, holds its shape when you lift it. If it pours, that's a different dish with the same name.

Collards or mustards — leafy greens cooked long and slow with smoked meat, a direct continuation of West African cooking traditions with the pot liquor as the whole point.

Baked beans — doctored. Nobody serves them from the can. There's onion in there, there's something sweet, and there's a strip of something smoked on top.

Cornbread — the sweet-versus-not-sweet debate has ruined family relationships and will continue to.

Fried chicken — alongside the barbecue, not instead of it. And note: after the Civil War, Black women in Gordonsville, Virginia built businesses selling fried chicken through the windows of passing trains. "Waiter carriers," they were called. Some of the earliest Black women entrepreneurs in this country were running a chicken operation off a railroad platform.

Peach cobbler, banana pudding, pound cake — pick your lane. Somebody's auntie owns each one and she knows it.

The Unwritten Rules

The grill has one operator. He does not need help. He will not accept help. Do not touch the tongs.

The spades table is not a friendly game. If you don't know how to count books, watch. Do not sit down to learn.

The aux cord is a position of authority. Whoever holds it must serve at least three generations — something for the aunties, something for the cousins, and at some point in the evening, the Frankie Beverly. It's going to happen. Let it happen.

The good foil pans go home with somebody. That's understood. Just know that anything you send food home in belongs to that household now.

And there is always one folding chair that everybody knows not to sit in.

Why We Keep Doing It

Because for a long stretch of this country's history, a backyard full of Black people eating well, playing loud, and not answering to anybody was not a guaranteed thing.

The cookout is what it looks like when it is.

So make a plate, sit in the shade, let the aunties fuss over how tall the kids got, and take the last Labor Day of the season seriously. Everything on that table came a long way to get there.

From all of us at Grow Your Edges Back — Black owned and operated — enjoy your holiday. Tag us at #growyouredgesback if your edges survived the humidity out there.

FAQ

— CEOLorenze