The London Coffee House and the erasure of Black history

This is a transcript of a recent episode of The White Meat Podcast I recorded about the recreation of a classic Philly landmark that appears to be missing some crucial context.

The film this podcast supports is having a Kickstarter where the last day you can contribute is March 2nd, 2025. Please consider donating.

Hey, welcome everybody to the White Meat Podcast. I’m your host, David Dylan Thomas and I’m the writer/director of a movie called White Meat. The premise is that underneath Washington Square Park in Philadelphia are buried the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people. This is, this is actually true.

What if one night they come back from the dead as zombies but they only eat white people? So that is the premise. And for the podcast today there’s no guests, I just wanted to talk for a little while about the London Coffee House. So the London Coffee House is an old coffee house in Philadelphia.

It was founded in the 1700s and it is located or was located at a market in front street in Philadelphia. It’s what we call Old City now. And there is a historical marker there. And if you go there, the marker will sort of say, hey, this is a place where businessmen used to gather, really, everybody public officials, like the intellectual elite, this is just a big gathering place in Philadelphia.

And then the other thing it will mention is that lots of business was discussed here, including slavery. This is a place where you would inspect slaves coming off the boat, because this is right on the water. Right, right by the the Delaware River. And and auction them off. Like, this was a slave auction.

A lot of times, when people picture slave auctions, they sort of picture, like, that Key and Peele skit, where they’re out in the open, on a kind of raised platform, maybe kind of in a small town in the South or in the woods or something, and just a lot of guys are gathered around watching them. And this, of course, happened.

But what you should picture as well is like a Starbucks, right? Picture a Starbucks and people are talking business or whatever and having meetings, but then also every now and then trotting some slaves in and human beings are being sold and inspected as if they were meat. This happened, right. Now, the reason I bring this up now and, and for context, like I learned about this in my research for White Meat, right?

I’m looking at the history of both slavery and abolition in Philadelphia. And this is one of the things that comes up. And like I said, this is an open secret, right? There’s literally a marker right at Market and Front that says, Hey, this is what used to be here. So a friend of mine Emily, who’s, who’s helping us out with with, with white meat and helped me learn a lot about the city’s history sent me an article that was sort of like, hey Penn for the sesquicentennial. Am I, am I getting that right? It’s the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Philly is obviously going to make a big deal out of this because it was signed here. For the sesquicentennial they are one of the things they’re doing is the Penn Museum is sort of having an exhibit about those times and the revolution.

And they are, they have built a replica. Of and I want to get it right here because at first I thought it was specifically a replica of the London Coffee House and the one article I could find about it. This is MSN. I’ll put in the show notes or the description a link to the article. MSNBC wrote an article about this.

Basically saying, okay, the, the specific language I think says it isn’t the style of the old London Coffee House, right? But it may be based and I’ll let you read the article, decide for yourself. It sounds like it may be based on a different coffee shop that was founded by Ben Franklin in 1740 and used to be on Arch Street, which is not Market Street.

So this is a completely different thing. So regardless what it made me think of immediately is, okay, are they, if it is based on the London Coffee House. Are they talking about that history, right? And again, going from the one article I could find, it doesn’t sound like they’re doing that at all. And this sort of article sort of highlights, hey, this is a place where revolution started and people had these really revolutionary discussions and business was happening here and they’re not really mentioning what business.

So again, I don’t know if this particular replica is literally meant to be based on the floor plans of the London Coffee House, specifically, but it, it, it got my, it got me going, right, because I’m like, okay, how can you talk about, how can you build a replica of this place, or even in the style of this place, as the article says, and not talk about one of its primary uses, that even this little marker in downtown Philly, which has one paragraph to sum up what it’s talking about, manages to mention.

You’ve got this whole space. So. This isn’t necessarily me calling out Penn and saying, hey, why didn’t they talk about this stuff? Because again, I don’t have all the facts here. But it’s notable that it at least didn’t come up in the sort of cursory glance that is this article. And it’s sort of to me. So, I’ll put it another way.

It is perfect, it didn’t surprise me because originally I thought it was meant to be literally a replica of the London Coffee House. It didn’t surprise me that, oh, they did that and didn’t mention the slavery at all. And again, I’m not saying that’s what they did because I don’t have all the facts yet, but if that had been the fact, I would have been like, oh, plausible, right?

And part of the reason I’m saying plausible is because one of the things I learned, and this is sort of like framing device, all right, priming, right? And this is me going back to my cognitive bias days here. I was primed to think that in part because news that did come through that is absolutely true is that Penn basically said, hey, we’re not going to do DEI anymore in accordance with, you know, presidential executive orders.

And that obviously was disappointing. To be fair, Penn has not always been on the right side of these issues anyway. You can look up their history with gentrification and West Philly and all sorts of other issues, but but to hear, okay, we’re not going to do any more DEI stuff and then hear, Oh, we’re going to build this replica and the style of a slave trading post and not talk about the slave trading.

It’s like, okay. That sounds plausible, that makes sense, that’s consistent with what I’ve seen. And the reason I’m making a big deal of this isn’t necessarily because I know all the facts for this particular case, but the theme of it, right? The idea that we’re going to celebrate the sesquicentennial and not talk about slavery.

We’re not, we’re going to talk about the 250th anniversary of this country saying, hey, people need to be free and not talk about the fact that that took place in the context of a lot of people not being free, right? And you know, I think the best historical evidence of this, the best historical take on this was Frederick Douglass’ What to a Slave is the Fourth of July, and I highly recommend you look that up.

Actually, look up, Google that and Baratunde Thurston, because he would give a reading of that every year on the 4th of July, that is just, just blistering, it’s so, so, so good to hear it come out of his mouth. But, but that, that juxtaposition, right, and that we, it looks like, because the 250th is going to take place during Trump’s administration was, which is an administration that if nothing else has made it clear, they want to eliminate any mention of DEI from any public discourse from even internal discourse at companies, right?

They’re using the FCC to go after, you know cable companies and entertainment companies to tell them, hey, don’t be talking about Black people. Don’t have ERGs. Right. Cause we’ll revoke your license. Basically any. Federal agency that has any influence. Let’s say you’re a hospital and you got a lot of money coming from Medicaid.

You better not have that diversity program anymore, or we’ll come and take it away from you. Right? So they’re wielding this power, not just for federal offices, but also for things that aren’t federally you know official federal government offices, but are federally funded, right, get any kind of funding from the government.

So they’re going to use that leverage to extort a lack of DEI. All of which to say that, like, it is sad to me to think about the 250th being a time of celebration of this country at the expense of ignoring kind of the tragedies. And the London Coffee House is kind of a perfect example of that, right?

This idea we’re going to replicate this thing and not talk about the bad side of it, which was a pretty significant part of it. Like I said, the historical marker kind of mentions one thing that it did. And, and, and it’s important too, because it shatters a lot of myths we have about America. People think about Pennsylvania, and they think about it as a free state, which it was, but it wasn’t always that way, you know, and we think about Quakers as being very abolitionist, which they were, but didn’t start that way. William Penn had slaves and they they didn’t start that way, right? The, the history that we have is sort of the sales pitch of like what we want to believe America is, you know, we want to believe it is a land of freedom. We want to believe it is, it is a meritocracy, right? That’s the sort of propaganda around getting rid of these diversity initiatives is because those diversity initiatives are unfair. They’re not about meritocracy, right?

So you say, no, it’s a meritocracy and you sort of, anybody who’s lived a day knows that that was never the case to begin with this. You’re not going back to any kind of meritocracy because it was never there to begin with. But. But to, to tell the truth about the London Coffee House is to expose that lie and say no, this is a place where, yes, revolutionary discussions were happening, and they were selling human beings to each other.

So, the, this ties in pretty directly with White Meat in a few ways. So one is that, like I said, my friend Emily kind of gave me a tour of Old City and helped point out some of these locations in the history of slavery and abolition in Philadelphia. And that became kind of the map for the movie. We’re talking about the feature here.

And so there are scenes in a lot these places, including one scene and spoiler alert for a movie that fingers crossed will come out in a few years. There is a scene that takes place in what is now, now the site of the London Coffee House now, like when I wrote it, it was sort of an abandoned bar.

So there’s a scene in an abandoned bar that happened to be the site of the London coffee house where there is a slave auction. But instead of Black people, it’s white people. It’s white people being auctioned off by these zombie slaves to each other. So, spoiler alert, and it’s, it’s rough. It’s a rough scene, and it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, I flatter myself that it’s gonna be the scene people are talking about after.

You know, like, in every horror film, there’s the one scene where people are like, oh my god, that scene, right? This is gonna be that scene. But it’s important to me to have it in there to talk about this, because it’s, I never actually used this line in the movie. But it is a line that kind of keeps coming back to me when I talk about the film and it’s this when it happens to white people it’s horror when it happens to Black people, it’s history, right? So nothing that happens. And I’m not going to tell you what happens in the scene. Cause I’m just not, but, but what happens in the scene is horrible, but it was routinely done to Black people before and during auctions, slave auctions. So so you got that to look forward to. But but that is, that is another part of this, like to actually understand how horrible something is. It, thinking of it as, oh, slavery, this thing that happened a long time ago, and it wasn’t that long ago, but this thing that happened a long time ago, like, and it’s sort of this abstract thing.

Even to replicate that now and show them, have a movie about slavery, we see these things happen to people. There is a difference, I think, and that’s kind of the, almost the treatise of the movie, right? That this is a movie where the Black people are safer. It hits different. So that’s why it’s important albeit cruel to sort of recontextualize all of this violence and say, okay, I get that you understand, at some intellectual level, that it was horrible that we did this to these people. But if you see it happen to people, you’re not used to seeing it happen to suddenly it hits different, and you realize, Oh no, that really is a horrible thing to do to another human being.

Because, let’s face it, there’s a degree to which people still don’t fully accept the humanity of Black people. Or the humanity of women, or the humanity of trans people. Like, even if they’re not outwardly offensive and oppressive for a lot of people. They’re still not there yet. They’re still not endowing them with the same humanity that we endow white people, especially white men with, which frankly is why they’re able to get away with so much.

And you can have an election where on two occasions you try to have a woman defeat Trump. And Trump wins, and you have an old white guy try to defeat Trump, and Trump loses. I’m just going to leave that there. So yeah, this is going to be politically ranty and I don’t know why we expected anything less.

But all of which to say that the London Coffee House is really important for that reason. So it really drew my attention when I saw this article. And the other thing, and I’m really only realizing this now, it’s really funny. So the short, which is what we’re raising money for now, we are about as, as I record this 11 days to go, we just just crossed the 50% mark, so we’re full steam ahead to get through the other end.

And whitemeatmovie.com they’ll, there’ll be a link there to take you to the Kickstarter. Please, please, please, please, please donate and then tell all your friends so they have a chance to donate as well. But I set the movie the short in effectively a Starbucks. It’s a made-up coffeehouse called Beanjamin Franklin.

But but I set it in a coffeehouse and the reason I did it at the time was because I had this idea already for like a short, like, Key and Peele type skit where it was extreme sports for Black people. And the idea is, you know, for them, extreme sports would be going into a coffee shop and not ordering anything, right?

And just waiting to see when they’ll get kicked out or if the cops will be called on him, which is based on an actual incident, right? There was a Starbucks in Rittenhouse Square where this actually happens. Two black gentlemen are waiting for their white friend and someone, and they hadn’t ordered anything yet because their white friend hadn’t showed up.

Right? And they got the cops called on him and it was a whole big deal. So this was, okay, combining that idea with White Meat to say, okay, this is going to be the context in which this zombie attack happens. So that is the short that we’re going to shoot. But now, reflecting on it, I realize that coffee houses actually hold this whole other significance.

There’s a lot of objects in life that, because of the transatlantic slave trade, hit different for Black people. We can talk about water, and the significance of being sold down river, or, you know, more pertinently, like, that actual crossing, which was just a nightmare, a horror show, and, not infrequently, Black people would either jump to their deaths in the water to escape the horror that awaited them, or that was literally with them on that boat, or, or if some of them got sick, the traders that were ferrying them from coast to coast would simply get rid of the bad stock and literally throw people overboard.

And if you were chained to someone who were, you were sick, who was sick, even if you were healthy, you would get thrown overboard too, right? So they would be thrown, so there’s this association with water that suddenly hits different. And if you ever see Wakanda Forever, Black Panther. There’s that flood scene.

It’s different. If you’re kind of familiar with that history. And then there’s trees. This one came up for me in an episode of America Outdoors that bring up Baratunde Thurston again. And there’s this really moving episode where he goes and he’s supposed to be like, you know, climbing this tree as the sort of outdoor activity.

And it gets, he starts to get higher and all of a sudden just, he can’t continue. And you realize, Okay, Black people have a very different relationship with trees than white people do, right? He has a white guide who’s taking him out there, and then they sort of and then he just sort of goes through it, and they’re all very cool about it, and they’re like, okay, totally understand, but black people were hung from trees.

A lot. Like, that is in our race memory. Like, like, I cannot tell you the the thousands who died at the end of a rope tied to a tree. You know the the song Strange Fruit, right? That’s what that is. So it’s, there’s this violence that is now associated with trees. So they ruined water for us. They ruined trees for us and they’ve ruined coffee houses for us.

Right? So the coffee house to me kind of on a smaller scale, but still fits that thing that hits different for Black people than for other people. Because there’s no one else that I know of in history who, if you were in a coffee house, you were probably being sold, or bought, and being inspected, like you were a horse, except they treated horses better.

So, that, that’s important. But yeah, like, and all of that, again, that’s why that, the story about the London Coffee House and the replica of, in the style of that house, to me, is really, really important. And the first thing I looked for when I heard that Penn was doing this was, okay, are they going to talk about slavery?

From what I can tell, and again, from just this one article, that’s sort of a very cursory glance at it, they’re not. And I will visit it and try to get a sense of, A, is this actually meant to be based on the London Coffee House, or is it just a coffee house in general? Because there were hundreds of coffee houses, right?

I don’t think all of them were slave trading posts. In fact, I’m not sure if any one other than the London Coffee House was, but I do know the London Coffee House was so I’m going to check that out and try to get a vibe for like, you know, what’s going on here and what’s the intent. But just the possibility of that and that that was the first possibility I thought of kind of tells you where my head is at, at least in making this movie and why I think it’s important to make this movie because as I’ve said on previous podcasts and on other podcasts from other people’s shows, like part of what I want the work of this movie to do is to create this invitation to study history and there’s going to be some things in the film that are explicit and we’re going to talk about, hey you know, the Haitians beat back Napoleon, right?

Like literally twice, like this, that, that is the explicit thing that someone’s going to say out loud in the movie. But then there’s going to be other things that are just in the environment that are going to invite you to learn more, like the story of Oney Judge. There’s going to be a visual reference that invites you to say, well, wait, who is that?

Why is that there? And you Google it, in much the same way that, like, in an MCU film there’ll be some little, like, object in the background that if you’re a MCU head, you’re gonna know, oh, that’s the thing from The Thing! And then if you don’t, you’re gonna read some article that’s like, 250 easter eggs from the whatever.

And then you’ll look it up that way. But but it’s important to me that that history be told. And, heh heh, Looks like I’m gonna have to do it because I don’t think Penn is. I, you know, and again, I want, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and like go there and be like, oh no, no, we got a whole thing here on the wall just like at the London Coffee House that says, yeah, people used to trade slaves here. I’m not betting on that, but I’m also not going to say it’s not going to happen, but but yeah, so I really, I really felt moved to take this week to talk about the London Coffee House. And I invite you to Google it, to learn about it.

If you’re in Philadelphia, go down to Market and Front. Things right there. You can see what was going on, and there’s a lot of those markers all around Philly. It’s a great, great rich city for that, and there are tours that will take you through all of that. But yeah, I think that’s where I wanna, where I wanna end it.

Like I said, we’re 11 days to go in the Kickstarter. Please, please, please donate. Like I said, we crossed a really important marker, the the 50 percent mark earlier this week. And so we got another, that was 30k, we got another 30k to go, and I believe we can do it if, if we all pitch in. So please, please, please we’ll have a link in, like, the show description directly to the Kickstarter, but if you just want to hear, something that’ll take you there easily.

Whitemeatmovie.com. There’ll be a link right at the top of the page. That’ll take you to our Kickstarter. We’ve got lots of cool prizes, t shirts, laptop skins, tours all sorts of fun stuff. So yeah, that is it for this week for the White Meat Podcast. I’m your host, David Dylan Thomas, and we’ll see you next time.

The film this podcast supports is having a Kickstarter where the last day you can contribute is March 2nd, 2025. Please consider donating.