Leah Chase, Creole Chef Who Fed Presidents and Freedom Riders, Dies at 96

“If we would have moved off this corner, this whole community would have been gone a long time ago,” she told Carol Allen, a biographer. “Running away from it isn’t going to help anything or anybody. I say like this, If you can’t take a risk, you’re wasting God’s good time on earth.”

Mrs. Chase believed in corporal punishment, opposed abortion and believed women should dress modestly. But she was always a champion of women, especially young women coming up in the kitchens of America’s restaurants. Her frequent advice to them was, “You have to look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man and work like a dog.”

Mrs. Chase won numerous awards for her civil rights work and her cooking, but she was perhaps proudest of the work she did to promote art, Ms. Harris said.

Mrs. Chase was 54 when she first walked into an art museum.

“Museums were segregated, and you didn’t go there, so we knew nothing,” she said. Her guide was Celestine Cook, a New Orleans socialite and civic leader who was the first African-American to sit on the board of the New Orleans Museum of Art, which Mrs. Chase would join in 1972.

Her husband gave her a painting by the late African-American artist Jacob Lawrence, and her love of collecting was set. The walls of her restaurant were soon filled with pieces by artists like Elizabeth Catlett and John T. Biggers. It was considered by many to be Louisiana’s best collection of African-American art.

A portrait of Mrs. Chase chopping squash in her kitchen by Gustave Blache III is in the National Portrait Gallery, and her chef’s jacket and other artifacts from her kitchen are on display in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.

She often said she would “be as mean as a rattlesnake” without art.

“Art softens people up and warms them up to deal with each other in humane ways,” Mrs. Chase told a congressional committee in 1995 in an effort to save funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.