…”Everybody could tell you Georgia Gilmore didn’t take no junk. You pushed her too far, she would say a few bad words. You pushed her any further, she would hit you.”
Gilmore brought that fighting spirit to the courtroom. She fearlessly 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.
The testimony made Gilmore a hero to local blacks, Edge says. But “in the white world she became a pariah.” Gilmore lost her job as a cook at the National Lunch Company – though Edge says it’s not clear whether she was fired or resigned “knowing her testimony would lead to her dismissal.”
King lived a few blocks from Gilmore and was a fan of her cooking and her activism. “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?’ ”
So she did. With King’s support, Gilmore turned her house into an informal restaurant.
“[Robert F.] Kennedy came, [Lyndon] Johnson been here – Dr. King brought him,” Gilmore’s son, Mark Gilmore, who died in 2008, told NPR in 2005.
Gilmore died on the 25th anniversary of the civil rights march from Selma. She’d spent the morning preparing chicken and macaroni and cheese to feed people marching in observation of the anniversary. Her family served that food to those who came to mourn her.