Transcript
Capital One Bank Guy (0:00)
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One Bank Guy. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too. Oh really? Thanks Capital One Bank Guy. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capital1.com Bank Capital One NA Member FDIC.
Erin Menke (0:34)
Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.
Aaron Manke (0:42)
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Erin Menke (1:06)
By the time she had boarded the bus home In October of 1955, Georgia had already had a very long day. Tired from work, she dropped her fare in the till and went to go sit in the segregated back of the bus. She stopped short when the bus driver began to yell at her. He ordered her not to walk through the white section at the front of the bus. She would need to get off and re enter at the back of the bus. Georgia couldn't believe it. She was already on the bus, wasn't she? But seeing as he wasn't going to budge and deciding that she would rather get home than fight with a power tripping driver, Georgia sighed and got off the bus. But the moment she stepped foot on the sidewalk, the bus sped off with her fare still on board. And it wasn't the first time the Montgomery, Alabama bus system had discriminated against black writers. And it certainly wouldn't be the last. Two months later, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white writer. And when Georgia Gilmour heard that local leaders were planning a bus boycott, she knew she had to be involved. On December 5th of 1955, Georgia watched as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Spoke before a crowd of thousands at the Holt Street Baptist Church. He proposed that the black community should put together their own form of transportation in protest, using donated cars and personal vehicles to ferry black people to work in schools across Montgomery. His idea was met with thunderous applause, Georgia included. But she was already thinking ahead. Even if dozens of community members donated cars, it would still cost money to keep up the boycott. Cars needed gas and oil and drivers needed wages. But Georgia needed had just the idea to fund the boycott. She was a cook by trade, working for the National Lunch Company, so she decided to put her skills to use. She started selling food at protest meetings and black owned businesses showing up with baskets full of fried fish, pork chops, sweet potato pies and pound cakes. And soon enough, Georgia had organized dozens of women across the city to do the same. Many black people in Montgomery worked for white families and were afraid that being a visible part of the protest might cost them their jobs. But cooking and selling food was a quiet way to support the cause. Georgia dubbed her network the club from Nowhere. If people asked where the food had come from, the cooks could truthfully say it came from nowhere. Georgia became a welcome sight at every weekly boycott meeting where she would sing and dance down the church aisle and report each week's fundraising numbers. The Club from Nowhere typically raised the equivalent of $1,500 a week, and Georgia herself probably raised most of the money of any person in Montgomery. For 381 days, Georgia's cooking kept the boycotters fed and funded. When Dr. King and other leaders were arrested for conspiring against the bus System's business in 1956, Georgia testified at the trial, telling her story of the white bus driver driving off with her fare. The testimony made Georgia even more of a celebrity among Montgomery's black community, but also made her visible to the white opposition. The national Lunch Company fired her shortly after. Now, Georgia was a clever and resilient woman, but this was a setback. She had six children to feed on top of managing the Club from nowhere, and she was having trouble finding another cooking job. When she brought these concerns to Martin Luther King, Jr. He told her he had a solution. Why not work for yourself? With some capital from Dr. King, Georgia opened a restaurant in her home from which she could continue to feed the revolution. Dr. King began to use it as a meeting house, and he brought Robert Kennedy and president Lyndon B. Johnson to meet Georgia and eat her food. Finally, on November 13th of 1956, the Supreme Court ruled Montgomery's segregated bus lines were unconstitutional. A month later, the bus boycott ended for good. Georgia Gilmour continued to be a civil rights activist and beloved chef. In fact, the day she died on March 9 of 1990, she had been up early cooking meals for the 25th anniversary celebration of the Selma to Montgomery march. Her family instead served the food to the hundreds who came to mourn her. Dead or alive. Georgia was still feeding the fire. Foreign.