Coon Chicken Inn: You Walked In Through the Mouth

Coon.

That word never meant anything good. Not once. Now picture it painted across a set of giant teeth, over the front door of a restaurant, and picture white families lining up to walk through those teeth for Sunday dinner.

I'm talking about the Coon Chicken Inn. It ran for more than thirty years, from 1925 to 1957.

But before I take you inside that restaurant, I want you to know who actually built the fried chicken business in this country. Because it wasn't the man who owned that building.

The women at the train windows

After the Civil War, Gordonsville, Virginia, was a main stop on two railroad lines, and the trains had no dining cars. So Black women met them. They cooked fried chicken, biscuits and pies at home, carried it to the station, and sold it to passengers through the open train windows. They were called waiter carriers, and they made Gordonsville famous as the fried chicken capital of the world. In 1970 an 80-year-old woman named Bella Winston, who learned the trade from her mother, told a local paper: "My mother paid for this place with chicken legs."

Sit with that one. Black women, in the years right after slavery, frying chicken and buying property with it. The scholar Psyche Williams-Forson named her whole book after that line: Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs.

That's the greatness. That's who fried chicken belongs to.

Now watch what got built on top of it.

The restaurant and the caricature

In 1925, on Highland Drive just outside Salt Lake City, Utah, Maxon Lester Graham and his wife, Adelaide, opened a fried chicken restaurant and gave it a slur for a name. The front of the building was a head about twelve feet high: a grinning caricature of a Black porter in a cap, huge red lips, mouth wide open. That open mouth was the door. You walked through the teeth to get your table.

It worked. In 1929 a second one opened in the Lake City neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Around 1931 a third opened on Northeast Sandy Boulevard in Portland, Oregon. Three restaurants across the West.

And the face went everywhere:

• the menus
• the plates and the silverware
• the matchbooks and the postcards
• the children's fans
• the delivery cars
• the spare tire covers

There was a "Baby Coon Special" on the menu and a "Coon Fried Steak." The Seattle and Salt Lake locations added a cabaret and an orchestra. A Democratic club held meetings there. Sororities held parties there. Families celebrated weddings, anniversaries and birthdays there. In 1942 the Illinois Auto Club put it in a guidebook called Best Places to Eat.

This wasn't a back-alley joke. This was Main Street.

Working under that sign

Here's the part that's hard to hold. Some of the people working inside were Black. A Salt Lake City headwaiter named Roy Hawkins remembered pulling down $100 to $200 a night in tips, back when a bricklayer made $5 a day. He took the insults from customers, and he told the Salt Lake Tribune in 2006 that he ended up "laughing all the way to the bank." He also said this: "Back in those days... it wasn't nothing to see [such] mockery. Black folks was always being mocked."

So Black hands carried that food to the table, under that face. And the man whose name was on the deed sold the whole thing under a cartoon of us.

Resistance

Now you might ask, did anybody fight back? They did.

In 1930, the Seattle branch of the NAACP and the city's Black newspaper, the Northwest Enterprise, went after Graham and threatened to sue him for libel and defamation of the race. He backed down, on paper. He agreed to take the word off the delivery car, repaint the head at the entrance, and cancel an order for 1,000 tire covers with the face on them. Then he broke the agreement. He dodged the lawsuit by changing the face from black to blue. Same face. New paint.

The Seattle and Portland restaurants closed in 1949. Salt Lake City kept serving until 1957.

1957. That's not ancient history. That's within the lifetime of people reading this.

What gets remembered

So how does a thing like this get swallowed up and forgotten? By being treated as harmless. A "vintage" brand. A funny old sign. The plates and matchbooks turned into collectibles, and the market got flooded with reproductions of things the restaurant never even made. The mockery outlived the restaurant and became merchandise.

And the real story, the waiter carriers in Gordonsville buying houses with chicken legs, didn't make the postcards. One version of Black people and fried chicken got printed on plates and matchbooks. The other one got told in a small-town paper by an 80-year-old woman.

But here's where it turns.

Those signs and plates are evidence now. At Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan, the Jim Crow Museum uses Coon Chicken Inn signs to teach exactly how this country was trained to see Black people. On September 30, 2026, the museum opened a new $22 million home, with about 30,000 objects. Its founder, Dr. David Pilgrim, put the goal plainly: "I want to live in a country where people are intelligent enough and compassionate enough not to buy them."

They put our face on a sign and called it a brand. Now that sign hangs in a museum as proof of what they did.

The receipt

So here it is. For everybody. Now you know.

Know who fried chicken belongs to. Tell a person and share the receipt. It belongs to the women at the train windows in Gordonsville.

The Receipts R the Recipe.

Sources & Further Reading

• BlackPast — "Coon Chicken Inn" (Catherine Roth)
• Jan Whitaker, Restaurant-ing Through History — "Famous in its day, now infamous: Coon Chicken Inn"
• Coon Chicken Inn — locations, dates and closures
• NPR / Maine Public, Maria Godoy — "The Fried Chicken Capital Where Racial Progress Began Along the Rails" (2015)
• Psyche Williams-Forson, Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
• Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University — The History of Coon Chicken Inn
• Spectrum News — Jim Crow Museum grand opening, September 2026
• Ferris State University — Jim Crow Museum grand opening, September 28, 2026
• Laura Hancock, “UVSC hosts racism exhibit,” Deseret Morning News, January 13, 2007 — listed in the Jim Crow Museum news archive.