Who Is Georgia Gilmore?
Georgia Gilmore seated at the kitchen table at her home in Montgomery, Alabama. Alabama Department of Archives and History. Donated by Alabama Media Group. Photo by Frank Sikora, Birmingham News.
Called “Tiny” and “Big Mama” by those that knew her, Georgia Theresa Gilmore became one of the staunch advocates and supporters of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. Born in February 1920, Georgia Gilmore grew up in Montgomery County on a small farm run by her mother. As a child growing up on her mother’s farm, Gilmore learned to slaughter chickens, feed hogs, and milk cows. A woman of many talents, Gilmore worked as a midwife, a domestic worker, and a cook to support her six children. Her culinary skills made Gilmore well-known throughout the black and white sections of Montgomery and proved to be a valuable asset to her during the Montgomery bus boycott.
By most accounts, Gilmore was a generous and caring woman with a bold, fiery personality. As pastor Thomas Jordan said in an interview, “It didn’t matter who you were… The word on the street was, ‘‘Don’t mess with Georgia Gilmore, she might cut you.’” (Edge, 20). Gilmore showed no fear in the face of racial discrimination and white supremacy. Gilmore sued the city of Montgomery when the local police assaulted and arrested her son, Mark Gilmore, as he took a through the whites-only Oak Park on his way to work in September 1957. The first lawsuit sought to end segregation in public recreational facilities, and Gilmore served as the lead plaintiff in the case, Gilmore et al. v. City of Montgomery (1959). Notable black civil rights lawyers, Solomon Seay Jr., and Fred Gray defended the case. In 1959, federal judge Frank M Johnson Jr. ruled that the city must integrate its recreational facilities.
She was a lady of great physical stature. She didn’t take any junk from anybody. It didn’t matter who you were. Even the white police officers let her be. She wasn’t a mean person, but like it was with many black people, there was this perception that she might be dangerous. The word was, ‘Don’t mess with Georgia Gilmore, she might cut you.’ But Lord that woman could cook. I loved to sit down at her table for some good greasing.
-Reverend Thomas E Jordan, pastor of Lilly Baptist Church
The quote is from "The Welcome Table" by John T. Edge, originally published in the Oxford American ( 2000).
Read an excerpt and the full text here.
When the city failed to comply with the suit, Gilmore filed another suit against Montgomery in 1971 (read the court document here). The U.S. District Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff and ordered the city to end the policy that allowed segregated private schools’ exclusive use of recreation facilities. The Supreme Court later upheld the decision. Gilmore supported the non-violent strategies of Gilmore and used the legal system to challenge racial discrimination, however, she was not afraid to employ a more physical form of resistance. When a white store clerk refused to sell her grandson a loaf of bread and laundry detergent, Gilmore pistol-whipped him with the clerk’s own pistol she took away from him.
By 1955, Gilmore worked as the cook for the National Lunch Company in downtown Montgomery. As one of the head cooks at the restaurant, Gilmore made perfectly crispy, fried chicken with a side of perfectly seasoned collard greens and a steaming pan of macaroni and cheese. If you were to look into the kitchen, you would have seen Gilmore pulling one of her prized sweet potato pies from the oven. Yet, neither Gilmore nor any other African Americans could enjoy the fruits of her labor at the restaurant. In the segregated South, the National Lunch Company catered only to white blue-collar workers. The National Lunch Company strategically hid the hands that prepared the food and washed the dishes at the back of the restaurant from the white clientele of the restaurant. As the plates of piping hot foot passed from the black hands of the cooks to the white hands of the servers at the front of the restaurant, the scene captured the reality of living in the Jim Crow South. Racial segregation influenced every facet of life for African Americans living in the Southern United States. In order to understand the life and experience of Georgia Gilmore, you need to understand the legal system of racial discrimination that dominated the South.
Jim Crow in the South
Image Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Hay, Edwin, and Montgomery Office Of City Engineer. Map of Montgomery, Alabama. [Montgomery, Ala.: Office of City Engineer, 1956] Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/2005625352/.
The Montgomery of Georgia Gilmore's time operated under a strict system of radicalized legal codes called Jim Crow. Defined as a legal and social system, Jim Crow laws reduced black citizens to second-class citizenship and maintained the physical separation of blacks and whites in the South. The term “Jim Crow” derived from minstrel shows in the 1820s, and referred to black characters and a popular dance. Minstrel show performer, Thomas “Daddy” Rice popularized the name through a blackface performance in which he imitated an old black man in ragged clothing. By the late nineteenth century, the term “Jim Crow” referred to the legalized system of “separate but equal” within public institutions. African Americans in Alabama and across the South legally could not eat in the same space at restaurants, nor sit together in movie theaters under Jim Crow. The system suppressed the voting rights of black citizens, allotted little funding for black public schools, and segregated neighborhoods.
The Alabama legislature did not solidify these racial codes into law until the ratification of the state constitution in 1901. Formal and informal policies in the 1870s and the 1890s enforced racial segregation in the state before the 1901 constitution. Through physical, economic intimidation, and psychological intimidation, white Alabamans maintained white supremacy in the region. Fifty-four years after Alabama legislators codified the doctrine of “separate but equal” into state law, an ordinance in Montgomery bus lines enforced segregated seating on city buses. Far from equal, the mandate became the center of a coordinated protest aimed at challenging the discriminatory laws of Jim Crow in Montgomery, Alabama.
Sources:
Blejwas, Emily. The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2019.
Edge, John T. The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South. New York: Penguin Books, 2017.
Hansan, J.E. “Jim Crow laws and racial segregation”. Social Welfare History Project. 2011.http://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/civil-war-reconstruction/jim-crow-laws-andracial-segregation/
Interview with Georgia Gilmore, conducted by Blackside, Inc. on February 17, 1986, for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954-1965). Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection.
Merriman, Scott. “Gilmore v. City of Montgomery.” The Encyclopedia of Alabama. 21 Oct 2015. http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-3690.
Nokow, Julie. “Segregation (Jim Crow).”The Encyclopedia of Alabama. 14 November 2019. http://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1248