I just copied this little nugget of information from Real Restaurant Recipes.
Southerners are the first to declare their fried chicken recipe as being the best, but Southerners weren't the first to fry their chickens.
The Scottish people who settled the early South apparently introduced fried chicken in the United States. They liked their chicken fried rather than boiled or baked as was normal for the English in the Northern states.
Give credit to people in the South for popularizing fried chicken because it wasn't until the early 1900s that recipes for fried chicken began appearing in Northern cookbooks.
It was also noted on one site that deep frying was also common in West Africa, so the slaves would have been quite used to frying their food.
Interesting stuff.
Sylvia