In the mid-19th century, most oysters consumed in the U.S. came from the Chesapeake Bay: the teeming estuary shared by Maryland and Virginia where people have been harvesting these bivalves for thousands of years. And many of those who helped make the era’s Chesapeake oyster industry the largest in the world — working the boats, gathering the shellfish with long tongs, shucking the catch and processing and packing the meat — were Black.
In an 1880 census of York County, Virginia, writes Ki’Amber Thompson for the Ocean Conservancy, “Black oystermen outnumbered White oystermen by four to one.” In fact, there is a long history of Black watermen in the oyster industry all along the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast, though those contributions to the U.S. food system have been largely overlooked. Often, the work was grueling: The first Black oystermen in this country were enslaved, and after Emancipation, sharecropping-style arrangements were common. Workers often faced unfair wages, dangerous conditions and racist laws that inhibited their ability to work for themselves. But oystering was long one of the main industries where free Black people could find employment — even providing a path to “official” citizenship at a time when the designation was legally restricted to white people — and some went on to captain ships or own processing plants and oyster bars.
