Monday, December 01, 2008

Georgia Gilmore & The Club from Nowhere

Rosa Parks & Martin Luther King

On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black passengers to relinquish seats to white passengers when the bus was full. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system and led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation.

Georgia Gilmore cooking

During the bus boycott that Rosa Parks triggered, a group of Montgomery, Ala., women baked and sold pies, cookies and cakes in beauty salons and on street corners to raise money to buy gas and station wagons to haul people to work The Club from Nowhere, as the group was known, was the brainchild of Georgia Gilmore, a cafeteria worker fired for her organizing efforts.

Georgia is one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights era.
Listen to our Hidden Kitchens radio story from 2005 -
Georgia Gilmore & The Club from Nowhere.
For recipe and photos - visit the
Hidden Kitchens web site. You can find Georgia Gilmore's recipes in our Hidden Kitchens Book.


Read an interview with Georgia from the Washington Film and Video Archive