HISTORY · THE PIT CREWS

The Black Pitmasters Who Built American Barbecue

By J. Bowman · Updated August 21, 2026 · 11 min read

For its first two centuries, American barbecue was cooked overwhelmingly by Black hands. Enslaved cooks ran the pits at the political feasts and plantation barbecues of the colonial South, freedmen turned the skill into the first barbecue businesses after emancipation, and their descendants staffed and shaped the famous joints that followed. The food kept their fingerprints. The credit did not. Here is the documented record.

A pair of hands with a mop basting a whole hog over a long pit of glowing coals, smoke rising into the dark

Photo by Angie Mosier for Southern Foodways Alliance (CC BY 2.0), cropped.

The pit crews of the colonial South

As the history of barbecue lays out, the cooking method that became American barbecue took shape in the colonial Southeast: coals in a trench, whole animals across them, a vinegar mop applied for hours. The people doing that work were mostly enslaved. Enslaved Black people were the principal cooks in most households of that era, and at the large public barbecues that marked elections, holidays, and muster days, the overnight pit shifts were theirs too.

This was expert labor. Cooking dozens of hogs evenly over shifting coals, judging doneness without a thermometer, keeping a trench fire alive through a twelve-hour cook: these are the same skills modern pitmasters train years to build, performed under coercion, for crowds the cooks themselves were often not welcome to sit with.

The consensus of the late 1800s

After emancipation, the skill became a livelihood. Adrian Miller, the James Beard award-winning historian whose book Black Smoke documents this history in detail, writes that a general consensus emerged in the late nineteenth century that African American barbecuers made the best and most authentic barbecue. White hosts hired Black pit crews for their barbecues the way they hired Black chefs for their kitchens, because they were the recognized masters of the craft.

Some of those cooks are documented by name. Old Arthur Watts, born enslaved in Randolph County, Missouri, in 1837, made sauces so prized they are still sold today. In Owensboro, Kentucky, Harry Green, born enslaved in Breckinridge County in 1855, started selling pit-cooked mutton from his home yard in the late 1880s, became the barbecuer of the Daviess County Fair, and cooked up to a thousand pounds of mutton a season at the fairgrounds for more than thirty years. Owensboro's commercial barbecue industry starts with him.

Henry Perry and the birth of Kansas City barbecue

The clearest case study is Kansas City. Henry Perry came to the city from Memphis in 1907, sold smoked meat from a stand in the Garment District, then moved to 18th and Vine, where he slow-cooked over hickory and oak and let the juices drip onto the coals. He smoked whatever the market gave him: hog, mutton, possum, raccoon. He called himself the Barbecue King in his own newspaper ads, and he was selling out daily decades before the city had any other barbecue landmark.

Two things about Perry's operation deserve emphasis. First, his restaurant drew Black and white customers eating together during the Jim Crow era, which locals described as a place where segregation ended when you walked through the door. Second, nearly every famous Kansas City barbecue lineage runs through his pits: Arthur Bryant's and Gates, the two names that define the city, were both founded by cooks who learned under Perry. He died in 1940. The style he coined is still the city's style.

Why the names faded

If Black cooks were the acknowledged masters into the early 1900s, why does the popular history feature so few of them? The mechanisms are well documented and none of them are mysterious:

Segregation limited where Black entrepreneurs could own restaurants, buy property, or get capital, capping how many businesses could scale.
Newspaper coverage followed ownership, not labor, so the pits got photographed while the pit crews stayed anonymous.
Urban renewal gutted thriving Black business districts, including barbecue rows, in mid-century American cities.
Starting in the 1990s, television and magazine food coverage centered white pitmasters, and the default face of barbecue reset within a generation.

Miller's account is blunt about the last part: the food coverage itself shifted, not just the industry. The result is a popular image of barbecue that is younger and whiter than the actual tradition.

The correction underway

The record is being rebuilt in public right now. Adrian Miller's Black Smoke (2021) gave the history its first book-length treatment. Pitmasters like Ed Mitchell of North Carolina, whose family whole-hog tradition goes back generations, have carried the story onto national stages, and his son Ryan and grandson continue it. Cities with surviving Black-owned joints, from Memphis to Kansas City to Lexington, Kentucky, treat them correctly now as what they are: the living continuity of the oldest part of the tradition, not a niche.

For a home cook, the practical takeaway is small but real: the low-and-slow method this site writes guides about, the pit, the patience, the vinegar mop, descends from cooks whose names rarely made the menu. Knowing that changes what you are participating in when you fire up a smoker on a Saturday.

Where this history comes from

Common questions about Black pitmasters and barbecue history

Who were the first pitmasters in America?

Enslaved and, later, free Black cooks. They did most of the pit work at colonial and antebellum barbecues, and by the late 1800s a general consensus held that African American barbecuers made the best and most authentic barbecue. Documented names include Old Arthur Watts in Missouri and Harry Green in Owensboro, Kentucky.

Did Henry Perry found Kansas City barbecue?

He coined it. Perry arrived from Memphis in 1907, ran pits in the Garment District and then at 18th and Vine, and called himself the Barbecue King in his own ads. The founders of Arthur Bryant's and Gates both learned under him, so nearly every famous Kansas City lineage runs through his pits.

Why are so many Black barbecue pioneers missing from older histories?

Segregation capped how many Black-owned businesses could scale, newspapers covered owners rather than pit crews, urban renewal gutted Black business districts, and food coverage from the 1990s on centered white pitmasters. Historian Adrian Miller's book Black Smoke is the standard correction.

Is Black Smoke by Adrian Miller a good starting point?

Yes. It is the first book-length history of African Americans and United States barbecue, published in 2021, and it documents both the tradition's origins and the mechanisms that pushed its people out of the popular story.