How a Metro Detroit Soul Food Restaurant Packs a History Lesson Inside a Shoebox #DetroitFood

Cornbread offers a “history in a box” meal focusing on important Black figures in American histroy. | Quinn Banks/Eater Detroit

“When you really come down to it, it’s American history, not necessarily Black history”

Cornbread Restaurant & Bar owner Patrick Coleman has started a tradition that’s continued at this Southfield restaurant with his shoebox lunches, a practice he began in 2018 with special cardboard boxes adorned with pictures of famous Black Americans and their stories. The annual promotion is a nod to Black train commuters who were banned from dining cars thanks to Jim Crow-era racism.

While enjoying fried chicken wings or catfish along with macaroni and cheese, customers can get a history lesson, reading about luminaries such as civil rights activist Ruby Bridges, star baseball player Satchel Paige, and writer James Baldwin. Coleman works with a printer in Memphis. Though the meals are especially popular during Black History Month in February, the lunches are available year-round. The boxes are also available for sale and many schools around Michigan and beyond have ordered them for educational use. Coleman has even received an order from Ohio State University. So far in 2025, the restaurant has gone through 8,000 boxes.

“We just wanted to give a history lesson,” Coleman says. “When you really come down to it, it’s American history, not necessarily Black history.”

Cornbread uses a Memphis printer to make these boxes.

Satchel Paige was one of Patrick Coleman’s father’s favorite players.

Coleman was inspired by what his grandmother and mother experienced as Black women in the ’50s taking the train from Detroit to Nashville. Once the trains crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, the country’s segregation became more visible. Black commuters weren’t allowed on the dining cars, so they had to pack their own meals, often stuffing food in shoeboxes and pulling them out in synchronization with other Black travelers. Coleman says his great-grandmother would pack chicken, macaroni and cheese, and fruit, decorating the box with jewelry and other trinkets.

As a child, Coleman recalls his mother and grandmother would reminisce during dinner, talking about how the times changed, and the challenges they faced. Coleman and the other kids would eagerly listen, hearing about how trains from the North would be cleaner than those in the South. Train cars carrying Blacks would often be covered with soot and needed to be wiped down.

The boxes comes with chicken wings or catfish, mac and cheese, and collards.

“These were incredible stories, they were stories that needed to be passed down,” Coleman says. “I stand on the shoulders of folks that couldn’t go to a restaurant [because] of their color, and here — today — I own a restaurant.”

He adds: “That was life in the South for Blacks.”

Patrick Coleman says he’s considered updating the boxes, but nothing is firm.

In 2022, two years after the police killing of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests and unrest. Cornbread created a new limited-edition shoebox. The “Stop Racism” box was “grittier” than the original, Coleman says, and featured the stories of folks including Breonna Taylor, the Tulsa Massacre, and Ax Handle Saturday in Jacksonville, Florida. There has been talk about other boxes in the future, to share the stories of more historical figures and the movement for Black civil rights. But for now, Coleman is happy to see how the boxes have taken off. He shares a story of two women in Georgia who use them as jewelry boxes.

“It’s very inspiring when you hear these stories of resourcefulness and resilience,” he says.

Cornbread Restaurant & Bar, 29852 Northwestern Highway, Southfield; History In Box can be ordered online

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