In the Montgomery bus boycott, Georgia Gilmore fed workers, MLK, and everyone in between
Even two presidents ate at her ‘Club from Nowhere’
By the time Rosa Parks made history by refusing to give up her seat for a white rider, Georgia Gilmore had already stopped taking Montgomery buses. A single mother of six who worked multiple domestic jobs, Gilmore was used to horrendous experiences with racist bus drivers. One day, after paying her fare and boarding a busy Oak Park bus at rush hour, the white driver told her to get off and reenter through the rear door. When Gilmore followed his order and stepped off the bus, the driver sped away. Gilmore decided then and there that she wouldn’t be riding the city bus any longer.
After that, “a lot of times,” Gilmore explained, “some of the young whites would come along and they would say, ‘Nigger, don’t you know it’s better to ride the bus than it is to walk?’ And we would say, ‘No, cracker, no. We rather walk.’ I was the kind of person who would be fiery. I didn’t mind fighting with you.” As Premilla Nadasen writes in her book Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement, “This kind of individual protest was not unheard of among black women in Montgomery before the bus boycott.”
Some months later in December 1955, when Rosa Parks was arrested, the Women’s Political Council of Montgomery implored the black community to engage in a one-day bus boycott on the day of her sentencing. “Another woman has been arrested and thrown in jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down,” they wrote on a flyer.
The savage lynching of Mississippi teenager Emmett Till — and the subsequent acquittal of his murderers — was fresh in the minds of Southern blacks, including Parks, who said she was thinking about Till the day she refused to surrender her seat. Determination to stand up to violence and discrimination was growing. After the success of the one-day boycott, Gilmore was one of hundreds of black Montgomerians who promptly joined the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), then under the direction of a pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr. The group gathered at a Baptist church in early December to plan for the boycott’s continuation.
Georgia Gilmore was a big, tough woman. According to her son, Mark Gilmore Jr., a former Montgomery councilman, “She was swift on her feet. She could move. Mama weighed about 350, 400 pounds. Martin Luther King had called her `Tiny.’” She worked primarily as a midwife, but also a nurse, a maid, and a cook at the National Lunch Company, a segregated, white-owned local business. Gilmore was known for her food, so when she was fired from the restaurant for her participation in the civil rights movement, Dr. King suggested she open her own place. She listened, and started serving food in her own house. As Montgomery Reverend Al Dixon put it, “Dr. Martin Luther King, he needed a place where he could go, where he could not only trust the people around him but trust the food.” Fellow Montgomerian and chef Martha Hawkins added “Plus they had a lot of secret meetings, and they didn’t want nobody to know, so they went to Georgia House.”
At “Georgia House,” Gilmore cooked for local lawyers, doctors, and police officers, civil rights notables like King, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and eventually even presidents. “Kennedy came, Johnson’s been here — Dr. King brought him — Wallace; all of them had a chance to eat at my mother’s table,” Mark Gilmore said. “She’d call you little names, you know. `Come here, li’l heifer.’”
Even in the early days, Gilmore was doing a swift business cooking out of her home, but the maintenance of the bus boycott required a great deal of coordination — and money. Those who couldn’t walk still needed rides to work. Some were fired for their participation and MIA sought to help them get back on their feet. Gilmore was a strong believer in the cause, and she soon realized that the best way to help fuel the movement was by feeding people. She started a group called the Club from Nowhere — deliberately named so that funds couldn’t be easily tracked and members could answer honestly that the money they had came from “nowhere.”
“We collected $14 from amongst ourselves and bought some chickens, bread and lettuce, started cooking and made up a bundle of sandwiches for the big rally,” Gilmore said. “We had a lot of our club members who were hard-pressed and couldn’t give more than a quarter or half-dollar, but all knew how to raise money. We started selling sandwiches and went from there to selling full dinners in our neighborhoods and we’d bake pies and cakes for people.” The Club from Nowhere sold baked goods in beauty parlors and launderettes, and took orders for meals they’d deliver. Gilmore told interviewers for the acclaimed TV series Eyes On The Prize that she raised about $125-$200 a week ($1100-$1800 by today’s standards), which she’d bring to MIA’s mass meetings and put straight into the movement’s coffers. Some say she raised more money than anyone else in Montgomery.
The bus boycott lasted 381 days, and marked a turning point in the fight for civil rights. A “miracle had taken place,” Martin Luther King Jr. would later say of its effectiveness. Gilmore remained active in the civil rights movement — the day she died in 1990, she was cooking a meal to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Selma March. She is remembered chiefly for her exquisite food — her chicken was legendary — but also for being a strong, steady source of warmth and support. In Reverend Dixon’s words, “She could talk on everybody’s level, a confidant. Know what’s going down, know what’s up.”
