It started small, in 1947

Brothers James and Robert Paschal opened Paschal Brothers Soda in 1947, a thirty-seat luncheonette at 837 West Hunter Street. There was no stove in the original location and neither brother owned a car, so hot food was cooked at Robert's house and delivered by taxi. The fried chicken recipe that came out of that arrangement remains a secret.

Black capital, Black business

When the brothers outgrew the shop, they did not go looking for outside investors. They moved across the street with an $85,000 loan from Citizens Trust Bank — a Black-owned bank financing a Black-owned restaurant's expansion, in a city where that loop was the only one available to them.

The restaurant as a movement

In December 1960, the Paschals opened La Carrousel Lounge next door. The club's clientele was largely interracial even though its liquor and business licenses specified "colored only," and the hostess, Orah Belle Sherman, deliberately seated white and Black patrons together in defiance of segregation law. Paschal's became the meeting place for planning sessions before the March on Washington, the Poor People's Campaign, and Mississippi Freedom Summer. John Lewis noted that the last time he saw Martin Luther King Jr. alive was at the restaurant.

What is left

Clark Atlanta University bought the restaurant in 1996, and a new location opened on Northside Drive in 2002 in partnership with Herman J. Russell. The original building and its motor hotel — the first Black-owned hotel in Atlanta — were renamed The Paschal Center. The original location remains on the Atlanta Preservation Center's "Most Endangered Historic Places" list.