Ed Smith Blacks Quotations

Many of the master chefs in the South, both the upper South as well as the deep South, were blacks and many of those people came here to Washington, D.C., and opened up establishments. Very, very few of them have survived. But they certainly were very prominent.

We were visited by whites, who always found coming into the black community to be interesting. Some even found it exotic. They knew that some of our restaurants were superior to their own. One of the interesting things is that whites discriminated against blacks. Blacks never discriminated against whites, and so they were always welcome.

Howard is still a great school. But many of the great faculty members that would be at Howard today are now at Harvard and Yale and Princeton. All this comes as a consequence of affirmative action and the admissions policies that encouraged blacks to enroll in the Ivy League schools.