Leah Lange Chase, the Creole chef whose gumbo sustained everyone from jazz superstars and two United States presidents to troubled families in the housing projects across the street from her family’s New Orleans restaurant, died on Saturday. She was 96.

Her death was announced by her family.

Mrs. Chase fed fried chicken, jambalaya and red beans to Freedom Riders and other young people during the civil rights movement, and gave James Meredith supper and a place to sleep the day before he integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962.

She and her husband, Edgar Lawrence Chase Jr., whose nickname was Dooky, provided a place for interracial political groups and civil rights leaders like Thurgood Marshall and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to eat and strategize when it was illegal for the races to mix in public.

“She lived in an extraordinary world and was a linchpin for extraordinary change and it was all done without self-aggrandizement,” said Jessica Harris, a scholar and writer who was close to Mrs. Chase.

A full obituary will follow.

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