In the new book The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South by John T. Edge, the little-known history about the cook who became a major force in the civil rights movement has come to light.

While many are familiar with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, the civil rights movement was a well-oiled machine with many working parts. One of those people involved was Georgia Gilmore whose secret kitchen fed and funded the civil rights movement.

During the 1955 Montogomery bus boycott, Gilmore was just as instrumental to the movement as King and Parks were. Gilmore sold chicken sandwiches and organized a group of women to create fundraising efforts to keep up morale. Women sold pound cakes and sweet potato pies, fried fish and stewed greens, pork chops and rice at beauty salons, cab stands and churches.

"She offered these women, many of whose grandmothers were born into slavery, a way to contribute to the cause that would not raise suspicions of white employers who might fire them from their jobs, or white landowners who might evict them from the houses they rented," Edge said.

The money was put to great use. It was used to create alternative transportation options for the many boycotters. It also paid for gas, insurance and even vehicle repairs. And funny enough the network of women called themselves the 'Club from Nowhere' because they did not want anyone to know of their work.

In 1956, King and others were indicted for the boycott and Gilmore was one of a few that gave a testimony cementing her place as a firebrand in the movement. She spoke out but lost her job as a result.

According to NPR, she denounced the white bus driver who had kicked her off a city bus from the witness stand. "When I paid my fare and they got the money, they don't know Negro money from white money," she told the judge.

Getting kicked off the bus or losing her job did not stop her. She took matters into her own hands.

"Whenever VIPs would come to town, he would always have Miss Gilmore cook up a batch of chicken," Nelson Malden, King's one-time barber in Montgomery, recalled in a 2005 interview with NPR. "When she was fired from her restaurant [job], Rev. King said, 'Well, why don't you go into business for yourself?' "

"Gilmore's house became a clubhouse for King," Edge writes, and often the first stop for people in the civil rights movement who visited Montgomery. "When King arrived in Montgomery during the 1965 march from Selma, he beelined to Gilmore's kitchen for pork chops."

Like many women in the movement, her story has not been plastered across the annals of history but she is worthy.

Cook Georgia Gilmore

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