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The restaurant has become a gathering place where leaders of the civil rights movement have been able to discuss strategy, often with their white allies. At the time, it was illegal to mix blacks and whites.
At the restaurant, Mrs. Chase fed the hungry freedom riders straight off the road and organized meetings of the National Association for the Advancement of People of Color. She let a young Thurgood Marshall use his phone to call Robert F. Kennedy, even when meal orders over the phone poured in.
"We were trying to be accepted without hurting anyone," Chase said in an interview with the national public channel "The Splendid Table". – They were just going there and breaking the door. They were going to take risks, go to jail if they had to. We could not understand that, but it worked. Many mistakes have been made, but sometimes that's what it takes to change a system. "
The great musicians and actors of the time also passed by his door. The restaurant had such a hold on the cultural firmament of the time that Ray Charles rewrote the words "Early in the Morning Blues" in tribute to the restaurant: "I went to Dooky Chase to get me something to eat. / The waitress looked to me and said, "Ray, you really look beaten.
Mrs. Chase was as compassionate as she was strict, still adhering to a code shaped largely by her Catholic beliefs. She was the hero of General George S. Patton, famous for World War II, and loved baseball, which she often used as a metaphor.
"I just think God is giving us a low, slow curve, but he does not want us to go on strike," she said in an interview with The New York Times. "I think that everything he tests you to test your strength, and you do not cry about it, and you go on."
She supported Tipper Gore's campaign in the 1980s and '90s against the explicit and violent lyrics of rock and rap and asked young men to dress well when they went to her restaurant. However, she did not leave the neighborhood then 1980s and a project of social housing of 896 units opened on the other side of the street. People have been in a hurry to move. Instead, she renovated.
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