Georgia Gilmore, often overlooked, fed and funded the Montgomery Bus Boycott and started the Club from Nowhere, a clandestine group that prepared and sold meals to raise money for the resistance. She was born on February 5th, 1920, in Montgomery to Janie and Taylor. She was one of seven siblings. She grew up on a small farm with cows, pigs and chickens, the latter of which Georgia took care of. It was a seemingly idyllic if otherwise uneventful life for Georgia. She grew up to become a midwife in Montgomery, where she lived with her six children. She was kind but was noted for her fiery temper, especially in response to the racial injustices common in Alabama. She would go on to resist discrimination on buses and confront the white men in her community if she or her family were mistreated. She was a courageous person but it would be in the year 1955 when she was to make her most important contribution to the Civil Rights Movement…
The Boycott
October, 1955. Georgia was known for her temper but it took every ounce of her willpower not to explode at a driver of a crowded bus in Montgomery. It was a Friday afternoon. Georgia had boarded and dropped her fare into the cash box. But the driver screamed at her. “GET OFF!” She fought so hard not to shout back. “Enter through the back door!” he demanded. “I told him I was already on the bus I couldn’t see why I had to get off,” Georgia later told a court at the trial of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior. Georgia collected herself. She stepped off the bus with only a few words said but before she could get back on, the driver sped off down the road, leaving Georgia stranded. It was then she vowed never to step on the bus ever again.
It was only two months later when Rosa Parks was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white man. It was a pivotal moment in the fight for civil rights. It inspired Georgia to attend a community meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church. She could sense a movement was afoot. And she wasn’t wrong. 5,000 people came to the meeting, including Doctor King. Together, the 5,000 vowed not to ride the buses until their rights as equal citizens were recognised. And Georgia wanted to help, however she could.
On December 1st, 1955, the Montgomery Improvement Association declared a boycott of the transit system beginning on December 5th. Georgia had already taken the decision to boycott but now it was a decision many black people shared. She joined the movement, deciding to use her culinary talents as a cook to feed and fund the resistance.
The Nowhere
The resistance became known as the Montgomery bus boycott. Georgia organised women to form the Club from Nowhere, a clandestine group she created that prepared savoury meals, including fried chicken sandwiches, fried fish, pork chops and lima beans, as well as baked goods, such as peach pie, selling the food from their homes, in local establishments and at protest meetings. Georgia’s vocal contempt for discriminatory white bus drivers came at a cost… she was fired from the National Lunch Company, but this only served to increase her participation in the resistance.
She was helped to set up her own restaurant in her home by Doctor King, who lived only a few blocks away, and other leaders of the movement. By selling food, and in creating the Club from Nowhere, Georgia was raising funds to support and feed the movement. She said in an interview in 1986:
We decided that the peoples on the South Side would get a club and the peoples on the West Side would get a club, and so we decided that we wouldn’t name the club anything, we’d just say it was the ‘Club from Nowhere’.
Georgia and 79 others testified in Doctor King’s defence in 1956, which led to her firing, but instead of searching for another job, she became a part of the resistance. Doctor King admired Georgia greatly and the two became good friends. He supported her however he could, even giving her some pork chops along with some money to equip her kitchen. He told Georgia:
All these years you’ve worked for somebody else, now it’s time you worked for yourself.
This was about more than food. Black people and white people ate in separate spaces, but in Georgia’s kitchen, there was no segregation. They were sharing common ground over a meal, exactly what Georgia wanted. “What we could do best was cook,” Georgia said. Without her, there is no way the boycott could have lasted as long as it did. The club was making hundreds and hundreds of dollars a week, its members selling their delicious home cooked meals wherever they could. Soon, boycotters and supporters of the movement were tracking down the members, desperate for the sumptuous food but also knowing that they were helping fund the movement.
Each week, the earnings were presented, always to rapturous applause. The club was a huge success. Georgia’s fondest hope was that she could encourage ‘ordinary folks’ to do the same. To take up the fight however they could, even through food as she did. She became a local celebrity, her stuffed pork chops, meatloaf, collard greens, fried fish and sweet potato pie among her most beloved dishes. People of all races, religions and social backgrounds ate together. Food brought them together. Georgia brought them together.
Clerical workers, politicians and professors, as well as Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy, ate regularly in Georgia’s kitchen. She was one of the few people Doctor King knew he could trust implicitly. He always held his secret meetings in her home, knowing he was safe there. Georgia’s kitchen had, truly, become a locus for change.
The Successes
The boycott lasted an astonishing 381 days. Hundreds of cars, lorries and wagons driven by supporters of the movement ferried black workers from their homes to their places of work, funded entirely by Georgia’s food. Every day. The insurance, the fuel, and the repairs. The lot. Georgia was a hero among the black community of Montgomery. In the white world, she had become a pariah, but after 381 days, on November 13th, 1956, the United States Supreme Court struck down laws requiring segregated seating on public buses. And on December 20th, 1956, Doctor King called for an end to the boycott. The resistance had won. And, in no small part, thanks to Georgia’s incredible efforts.
We felt that we had accomplished something that no-one ever thought would ever happen in the city of Montgomery and being able to ride the bus and sit any place on the bus you desire was something that hadn’t ever happened before.
– Georgia.
Despite the success of the movement, it was not the end of the racial discrimination Georgia suffered. And each time, she took action. In 1957, the police arrested her son Mark as he walked through a ‘whites-only’ neighbourhood. Outraged, Georgia decided to fight. She fought the charges. And she won. All charges were dropped against Mark. And he went on to become a Montgomery councilman.
On another occasion, a white store clerk refused to sell Georgia’s grandson a loaf of bread and a box of laundry detergent. When Georgia found out, she marched into the store, alone, took the clerk’s pistol from him and hit him with it. I told you she was fierce. And not afraid to break the law. She was a large woman with a swaggering personality. She showed little fear when it came to white people or what they might do.
Her activism continued into the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1958, she was involved in a class-action lawsuit to desegregate Montgomery’s public parks. It had been deemed unconstitutional by the district court, but continued. In 1965, her house became a clubhouse for Doctor King and the first stop for people in the Civil Rights Movement who were visiting Montgomery. It was Doctor King’s first stop in town before the March from Selma. He loved Georgia’s stuffed pork chops. He ate quite a few.
And in 1974, Georgia won her battle against the City of Montgomery at the United States Supreme Court, which ruled the practice of segregating public parks was unconstitutional. 1974. A 16-year battle, not once giving up. Not once giving in.
That was exactly the type of person Georgia was.
The Long Goodnight
Georgia Gilmore died on March 9th, 1990, at the age of 70. It was the 25th anniversary of the civil rights march from Selma. She had spent the morning preparing chicken and macaroni and cheese to feed the people marching in observation of the anniversary. Even at the end, she was still doing what she did best. She was excited to welcome guests from across America, her hospitable nature shining through. Instead, those visiting Montgomery that day were in mourning, but what unfolded was a huge celebration of the life of a civil rights legend. Georgia’s family insisted those visiting Montgomery ate the food she prepared. And they did. Her son Mark recalled her funeral in 2004:
You would have thought she was a world figure. The church was packed to capacity. And you know what’s amazing? She had the police as pallbearers. Can you believe that?
No, I can’t. Montgomery today is best-remembered for the bus boycotts and the resistance that changed the law. It is where some of the most transformative civil rights laws were fought and died for. And there is no doubt that Georgia is one of the movement’s most emblematic figures.
You don’t hear Miss Gilmore’s name as often as Rosa Parks, but her actions were just as critical. She literally fed the movement. She sustained it.
– Julia Turshen (author).
Georgia and the Club from Nowhere she created showed how the extensive efforts of black women aided and sustained the bus boycott, both in their financial contributions and in their commitment to the boycott itself. Her son Mark said that his mother had ‘elevated her day-to-day work – doing the cooking – into something greater’ and she had. She was a single mother of six with no formal education, working for white families as a cleaner, cook and nurse. When the boycott started, her underground club served in the service of black freedom and her vision became an example for others to follow.
Kia Damon is one, a chef in New York. She started the ‘Supper Club from Nowhere’, focusing on food education and ancestral dishes. “Even now, [Georgia] had such a big influence and impact on people like me,” Kia said. “She was just a woman baking and cooking and saw something that needed to be done and that really, really resonated with me.” And not just her, but with so many other people.
Georgia was the fearless cook who secretly fed and funded the Civil Rights Movement, and for that, she will never be forgotten.
I think whether they’re aware of Georgia Gilmore’s story or not, that generation of people of colour, of women of colour, who do that work now and call themselves food activists – whether they are focused on food deserts, inequality, or no matter what it might be, environmental racism, whatever it might be – they are inheritors of the legacy and the boldness, and the best of them are the inheritors of the pragmatic boldness of Georgia Gilmore.
– John T. Edge (food historian).
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Image (click on it to enlarge): 1) Georgia Gilmore. Image Credit: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/01/15/577675950/meet-the-fearless-cook-who-secretly-fed-and-funded-the-civil-rights-movement?t=1626965979714
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