The story of the ‘Coon Chicken Inn’
A jaw-dropping symbol of not Deep South, but Pacific Northwest racial bigotry
This story contains racial slurs considered offensive and descriptions of historical racial bigotry.
A Utah-based chicken restaurant that thrived for almost three decades proved that in defiance of accepted contemporary convictions, institutionalized twentieth-century racial bigotry was not solely confined to the American Deep South.
While the American 1920s saw an increase in the use of typecast Blacks in popular culture, the decade also signified the dawn of automotive convenience, when roadside hotels and restaurants, and accompanying novelty architecture to draw in patrons, became common. And in Utah, then later in Washington State, a bizarre chain of roadside restaurants called the “Coon Chicken Inn” combined the two.
These restaurants featured a 12-ft-tall grinning stereotype Black man’s head as the front door and proliferations of Black stereotypes inside, making it an identifying staple of racial bigotry in the American Pacific Northwest, where it thrived in the shadows of those more visible knuckle-dragging “brutes” of the Deep South.
