Dooky Chase's Restaurant
Making Rights Real - Louisiana Civil Rights Trail
Dooky Chase's Restaurant gained notoriety as a safe place where people of all races could sit down to meet and discuss strategies for the Civil Rights Movement. Iconic civil rights leaders such as Oretha Castle Haley, A.P. Tureaud, Ernest "Dutch" Morial, Thurgood Marshall, Dr. Ralph Abernathy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. all gathered in the upstairs dining room to have discreet discussions over Creole food. Leah Chase, chef and co-owner of the restaurant with her husband Dooky, famously said, "I like to think we changed the course of America in this restaurant over a bowl of gumbo." The couple often provided food at civil rights meetings and to demonstrators who had been arrested and jailed.