In April 2020, KJ Kearney decided he wanted to put together an online map of Black-owned food businesses in his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina so diners could support them during the early days of the pandemic. That project eventually turned into Black Food Fridays: a weekly series on Instagram and TikTok that celebrates Black-owned restaurants, encourages followers to support these small businesses, explores chapters in Black food history, and even hosts discussions with folks like W. Kamau Bell.
Kearney is no stranger to this kind of advocacy. Following a South Carolina House of Representatives run in 2016, he lobbied the city of Charleston to promote its Gullah-Geechee heritage, which led to the adoption of Red Rice Day in 2018. A community organizer and educator, he’s long been a beacon of light and inspiration—wherever he goes, Kearney’s mission remains steadfast, enlightening the uninitiated while remaining Charleston as hell.
Black Food Fridays has now accrued 158,000 followers on TikTok and 117,000 on Instagram. And his work gained even more attention when he was named a finalist in the social media account category at the 2022 James Beard Awards.
That’s where our stories intersect. I was fortunate enough to meet KJ in Charleston in 2013, and a conversation we had years later at a local brewery proved pivotal to the research I was doing at the time. This wasn’t out of the ordinary; KJ and I link up whenever I’m in town. But this meeting in particular felt like fate. That research turned into the Tek Cyear uh de Root series, which received a James Beard nomination in the feature reporting category. When I found out about it, I couldn’t wait to tell him the news: “Bruh, because of you, I was able to make sense of this project.” When he told me he was nominated, too, I was instantly filled with emotion.
Certain people come into your life to make you better. For me, Kearney is one of those people—he wants to see everybody win, and he really understands the importance of community, and how to be a bridge-builder. Even as I write this, I feel it’s not doing him justice; he’s that important to the culture of social advocacy. Yet that merely leaves room for you to look him up when you’re next in town, regardless of whether you’ve actually met before. It would be the Charleston thing to do.
Words,Jamaal Lemon