Kingsford says candidates will be chosen based on their connection to the barbecue industry, their contributions to the Black barbecue legacy and their commitments to the future, among other factors. The company is accepting applications for the program from Monday through March 1. The inaugural class will be announced in April.
In recent years, Kingsford says he has made efforts to support more diverse talent in the barbecue community, but last year it became clear that the company needed to step up its efforts.
“2020 has made all companies take a step back and look more deeply at how they could do more to support the contributions of the black community, which are so essential to the past, present and future of barbecue,” Shaunte, vice president of Kingsford Mears-Watkins’ strategy and marketing told CNN Business by email. “We also wanted to be careful about our approach to ensure that we would find a reliable role for our support.”
BBQ historian Howard Conyers, chef Kevin Bludso, star of “The American Barbecue Showdown” on Netflix, and FoodLab executive director Devita Davison will serve as mentors on the show, along with fellow pitmasters Bryan Furman, Rashad Jones and Amy Mills.
Conyers, 39, has been in the barbecue business since he was four, when his father, Harrison Conyers, who worked as a farmer and welder, taught him the traditional whole pork barbecue technique. The older Conyers learned from other black farmers in their hometown, Manning, South Carolina.
Howard Conyers is a rocket scientist who worked for NASA after obtaining his PhD in mechanical engineering at Duke University in 2009. He has spent the past seven years researching the history of black barbecue, much of which he says has been lost or credited to white men who owned the plantations, smaller farms and, later, the restaurants where the black masters of the arts used to cook and perfect their crafts.
Thirty-six pitmasters have been introduced to the American Royal Association’s Barbecue Hall of Fame since opening in 2012. Only five of them – Kansas City legend Henry Perry, Memphis restaurateur Desiree Robinson, John “Big Daddy” Bishop, CB Stubblefield and Chicago’s James Lemons – are black, although Conyers says that the origins of American barbecue are rooted in American slavery.
“The barbecue has been perfected in the hands of enslaved Africans for more than 350 years in the southern United States,” Conyers told CNN Business. “These individuals were not able to read and write to tell their own stories. We want to see this tradition of barbecue exalted, celebrated and become another centerpiece in the African American community.”
