What can food tell us about the history of the South and the rise of southern cuisine? In John T. Edge’s book The Potlikker Papers, he writes that “During the antebellum era, slaveholders ate the greens from the pot, setting aside the potlikker for enslaved cooks and their families, unaware that the broth, not the greens, was nutrient rich.”
Using food as the centerpiece, Edge describes how stories about food illumine history. “On the long march to equality, struggles over food reflected and affected change across the region and around the nation.”
During the Montgomery bus boycott that began in 1955, Georgia Gilmore fueled the year-long battle with sales of her friend chicken and cakes. Following the arrest of Rosa Parks, thousands of Black citizens gathered weekly for Monday night mass meetings, where preachers, including Dr. King, delivered motivating speeches while activists planned ways to desegregate the buses that “ferried maids and cooks to their jobs” in the white districts of the town.
Gilmore brought food to those meetings. She raised money, along with her friends, by selling sandwiches in the parking lot and on the front steps of the church so that they could provide food to those who couldn’t afford to feed themselves during the boycott.
When the boycott came to a successful close a year later, people like Gilmore had helped sustain the movement with her food, AND she inspired people with her words. At the final, celebratory mass meeting of the bus boycott in 1956, Georgia Gilmore sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “This Little Light of Mine.” She told those gathered there: “Weary feet and weary souls are lightened. We don’t have to walk no more. Even before Martin Luther King got up here and told us it was over, we knew it was over and we knew we had won.”
If Gilmore, who had so much to lose by speaking her mind, was no longer willing to accept the “lot they inherited, then change was surely on the horizon.”
Later, Gilmore’s house became a meeting place for Dr. King and others in the movement. Pork chops, fried chicken, pigs’ feet and collards—a favorite of King’s—were served there regularly.
In short, Georgia Gilmore’s home became “an executive dining room for the civil rights movement.”
And that only covers the first 40 pages!