Feeding the Movement

Since the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, people of African descent used food as a form of resistance. By adapting West African foodways to their new reality in the New World, enslaved Africans perceived a portion of their native culinary knowledge. The rice, okra, sweet potatoes, and greens prepared by enslaved persons represented a cultural identity in opposition to a system designed to dehumanize and strip them of cultural ties. Dishes like Hoppin John expose the continued Africanisms within black Southern foodways. The mixture of black-eyed peas, African in origin, and rice relate to the beans-and-rice dishes that connect foodways across the African diaspora to Africa. The addition of cured pork to the dish reveals the process of cultural diffusion between the enslaved Africans and members of their current environment. European, Indigenous, and African influences on the South formed the foundations of Southern food culture. The entanglement of African and American food culture made African American food traditions a reflection of migration, cultural exchange, and survival.

After emancipation, white Southerners used food and access to food in their quest to institutionalize the racial subjugation of black Southerners. The rise in Black Codes, later Jim Crow laws, throughout the South codified the separation of blacks and whites in public spaces including food spaces. The white power structure rejected the notion of African Americans eating within the vicinity of white Americans. Black Americans could prepare and serve food to white employers or patrons but were not allowed a seat at the table to eat with them. The denial of a seat at the table represented the systematic denial of equal rights and recognition as a citizen among African Americans. Food stood at the cornerstone of the Civil Rights Movement as African Americans began to conceive of freedom through the right to eat on equal terms with white citizens.

While food contained the power to separate and control African Americans, the material also gave shape to active forms of resistance during the Civil Rights Movement. Like their enslaved predecessors, African Americans in the mid-twentieth century enacted forms of subtle resistance. Food lends itself to daily forms of resistance. Food scholar Williams-Forson explained that “Food, as politics, is subtle and unexpected because it is not seen as a tool of opposition but as a necessary substance” (Williams-Forson, 69). When Georgia Gilmore used food and her skills as a cook to support the Montgomery Improvement Association, she took part in a legacy of food activism within the African American community. When Gilmore cooked a pot of collard greens and labored over a stew of chitlins, she participated in a centuries-old tradition of African American food culture. The preparation and the consumption of food go beyond a simple process and encompasses the social, economic, and political atmosphere of the South.

The women of the Club from Nowhere sold plates of fried fish with stewed greens and pork chops with rice to parents at the mass meetings who bought the food and toted it home to feed their families as the parents. The club also sold cakes and sweet potato pies to beauty parlors, laundries, cab stands, doctor offices, and other businesses to raise money to donate the MIA. The club allowed black domestic workers, who used their culinary knowledge and skills often in the service of white homes, to use their talents for the benefit of civil rights causes. Gilmore designed the club to protect the club members from the retribution of white employers and landowners who could fire them or evict them from the houses they rented. As the sole officer of the club, Gilmore turned in the money during the Monday evening mass meetings. The MIA secretaries, Mrs. Hazel Gregory, and Ms. Ernie Dirngy would write the donation as from nowhere in reference to the name of the club. Standing from her seat, Gilmore sung “Shine on Me” and “I Dreamt of a City Called Heaven” before she announced the money her club raised for the MIA. The songs were well earned as the club collected between $125 to $200 and sometimes more in a week. Gilmore’s support of the boycott extended beyond the selling of cakes and pies.

In 1956, Gilmore and other black Montgomerians challenged the efforts of white officials to end the boycott movement. On February 21, 1956, Montgomery County indicted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for violating an anti-boycotting law during the Montgomery bus boycott. Thirty-one witnesses, including Gilmore, testified to the mistreatment they faced when riding city buses in State of Alabama v. M. L. King, Jr. Gilmore’s testimony, compared to Mose Wright in the Emmett Till trial by John T. Edge, struck against a system designed for Black silence on their mistreatment and discrimination. Though she did not know the name of the bus driver, Gilmore described him in detail stating “I don’t know the driver’s name. I would know him if I saw him. He is tall and has red hair and freckles, and wears glasses. He is a very nasty bus driver” (Edge, 19). By explicitly stating the oppression she faced in court, Gilmore contradicted the dominant narrative of race relations in Montgomery.

In the aftermath of the trial, Gilmore lost her job at the National Lunch Company. The setback turned into an opportunity for Gilmore to use her culinary skills for the economic benefit of herself. King encouraged Gilmore to open a restaurant of her own and provided the seed money she needed to expand her home kitchen. Gilmore’s home restaurant was more of an informal space where she cooked out of her kitchen and served people in her dining room. Hungry white and black Montgomerians gathered together in Gilmore’s home to enjoy tastes of the South offered by Gilmore. Patrons crowded around Gilmore's dining room and spilled into her green-tiled kitchen while eating plates of chicken wings, macaroni and cheese, chitlin stew, and other Southern favorites. The restaurant served as a place where civil rights activists like Reverend Al Dixon and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. could gather around and strategize over a plate of fried fish and potato salad. When white Montgomerians caught wind of the clientele at Gilmore’s home restaurant and her insurance company refused to issue Gilmore a policy for her home, King stepped in to save the restaurant. Gilmore’s restaurant became a second home to King as he sat down to enjoy Gilmore’s famous stuffed pork chops and stuffed bell peppers.

Georgia Gilmore’s home restaurant represented many black-owned restaurants across the South that granted black and white civil rights activists a safe space to eat together. These restaurants offered a common table where plates passed from the hands of laundry women to civil rights protestors. The Montgomery bus boycott ended on December 20, 1956, when Montgomery Improvement Association voted to end the year-long bus boycott in the aftermath of Browder v. Gayle (1956). The next morning, Dr, Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Abernathy, E. D. Nixon, and Glenn Smiley boarded an integrated bus in Montgomery.

Sources

• Blejwas, Emily. The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2019.

• Bower, Anne. African American Foodways : Explorations of History and Culture. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2007.

• Cooley, Angela Jill. To Live and Dine in Dixie: The Evolution of Urban Food Culture in the Jim Crow South. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2015.

• Edge, John T. The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South. New York: Penguin Books, 2017.

• Ferris, Marcie Cohen. The Edible South: The Power of Food and the Making of an American Region. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Accessed February 13, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469617695_ferris (Links to an external site.)

• Interview with Georgia Gilmore, conducted by Blackside Inc. for the documentary Eyes on the Prize: American's Civil Rights Years (1954-1965) in 1979, Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection.

• Interview with Georgia Gilmore, conducted by Blackside Inc. for the documentary Eyes on the Prize: American's Civil Rights Years (1954-1965), February 17, 1986, Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection.

• Wallach, Jennifer Jensen. Getting What We Need Ourselves : How Food Has Shaped African American Life. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019.

• Williams-Forson, Psyche A. Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs : Black Women, Food, and Power. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.