the woods and you learned what you could eat. You knew you could eat that mayhaw, you could eat muscadines. You knew that, growing up in the woods. You just knew things. You got to appreciate things. Madisonville, a segregated town, did not have a Catholic high school for black children, so Chase moved to New Orleans to live with relatives and pursue a Catholic education at St. Mary's Academy. Chase's roots were heavily centered in Louisiana, with only one great-grandparent born elsewhere. Her ancestry was multiethnic inclusive of African American, Spanish, and French. Her ancestors include one of the first African Americans to serve in the Louisiana state House of Representatives (1868–1870). Early career After high school, Leah held other jobs, including marking racehorse boards for a bookie in New Orleans, in which she was the first woman to do so and an overseer of two nonprofessional boxers. Chase's favorite job was working as a waitress at the Colonial Restaurant and The Coffee Pot (which has been renamed "Cafe Beignet at the Old Coffee Pot") in the French Quarter in New Orleans with a pay of "$1 a day". Dooky Chase's restaurant In 1946, she married jazz trumpeter and band leader Edgar "Dooky" Chase II. His parents owned a street corner stand in Treme, founded in 1941, that sold lottery tickets and homemade po-boy sandwiches. Chase began working in the kitchen at the restaurant during the 1950s, and over time, Leah and Dooky took over the stand and converted it into a sit-down establishment, Dooky Chase's Restaurant. She eventually updated the menu to reflect her own family's Creole recipes as well as recipes—such as Shrimp Clemenceau—otherwise available only in whites-only establishments from which she and her patrons were barred. In 2018, Food & Wine named the restaurant one of the 40 most important restaurants of the past 40 years. Civil rights movement Dooky Chase became a staple in the black communities of New Orleans, and by the 1960s, became one of the only public places in New Orleans where African Americans could meet and discuss strategies during the civil rights movement. Leah and her husband Edgar would host black voter registration campaign organizers, the NAACP, black political meetings and many other civil leaders at their restaurant, including local civil rights leaders A. P. Tureaud and Ernest "Dutch" Morial, and later Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Riders. They