Order a Nathan and Coke at the Bar

The most iconic of the whiskey brands is Jack Daniels. It’s one of the top-selling hard liquors in the world.

I’m more of a tequila guy myself, but everyone knows Jack Daniels. So much so that people have regularly ordered a “Jack and Coke,” not whiskey and Coke, since my college years.

I’m aware that today, there are super high-end whiskeys as well as their corn-based version, bourbon.

But Jack remains the standard bearer.

Slight problem though. Mr. Daniels doesn’t deserve all the credit for the brand.

Little Jack Daniels was orphaned as a kid and ended up on the Lynchburg, Tennessee, property of Dan Call in 1850. Call was a pastor and whiskey distiller, and young Daniels wanted to learn the trade.

History books for years credited Call for teaching Jack how to make whiskey, but that turned out to be a lie.

The town name “Lynchburg” should be a dead giveaway as to why that was the case.

The largest enslaver in Lynchburg was none other than Townsend P. Green. He enslaved a person he called Nathan Green, who was forced to work for the religious Pastor Call without pay.

Nathan Green, who later changed his name to Nearest Green when slavery ended, was one of the best-known distillers around.

Green wasn’t just a great distiller because he was proficient in known distilling techniques. He took distilling to another level by developing a system of filtering liquor through sugar maple charcoal before aging it in charred oak barrels. This method is now used in making most Tennessee whiskey to this day.

Indeed, people who know the history of Tennessee whiskey refer to Nathan Green as the “founding father of Tennessee whiskey.”

I’m guessing that the Nazis who marched in downtown Nashville recently are going to have to give up whiskey once this story is told.

While the Daniels family continued to employ Nathan Green’s descendants for several generations, they never truly owned up to their past or gave Green his due. And by due, I don’t just mean the rightful verbal recognition they finally gave Nathan Green in 2017 as one of the co-creators of Jack Daniels whiskey, but financial due, too.

In 2022 alone, there were record volume sales of 5.3 million 9-liter cases of Jack Daniels in the U.S. and another 14 million cases sold worldwide. Annual sales were nearly $4 billion that year.

But the Green family sees none of that.

So many people built their family wealth on Green and other Black men and women but never shared that wealth.

Apologies and recognition are important, but they’re not enough.

The best way for America and its companies to fully acknowledge and come to terms with the untold number of Black men and women who helped make our nation rich is to recognize the Nathan Greens of the world and pay their descendants their rightful part of the wealth created as a result.

In the meantime, buy award-winning Uncle Nearest whiskey from the Nearest Green Distillery, established by Green’s female descendants using Nathan Green’s creations. Their whiskeys have earned 1,075 awards since 2019, making the brand the most awarded whiskey in recent years.

Even Jack Daniels doesn’t compare.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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