While there have been significant increases in anti-Asian and anti-immigrant harassment, we hope that Tastes of Home is a small reminder of the contributions of immigrants across this country and a starting point for bridging conversations across diverse groups. Our nation has been called to focus on the continued inequities and injustices endured by generations of Black communities. Just as the roots of xenophobia and racism are closely intertwined, so too are the pathways forward toward a more equitable and more just society for all. And similar to how food has played an important role for immigrant communities across time, food similarly has been pivotal in bridging, healing, and advancing Black and other minority communities.
Neighbors sit down, share stories and talk honestly to learn what devices us and what brings us together in the city of Decatur.
In a new book about African American foodways, author Rafia Zafar chronicles the influence of black cooks on the way we eat.
The Club From Nowhere: Cooking for Civil Rights
The Kitchen Sisters
Retrieved from NPR’s Morning Edition, March 4, 2005
“In the 1950s, a group of Montgomery, Ala., women baked and sold pies, cookies and cakes in beauty salons and on street corners to help fund the Montgomery bus boycott.
The Club from Nowhere, as the group was known, was the brainchild of Georgia Gilmore, a cafeteria worker fired for her organizing efforts. She was one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights era. The Kitchen Sisters and producer Jamie York tell her story.
We've been thinking about Georgia Gilmore and The Club From Nowhere ever since John T. Edge, from the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, called our Hidden Kitchens phone line last year to tell us about her secret civil rights kitchen in Montgomery, Ala. Any woman who could raise money selling pies and cakes out of beauty parlors to buy gas and station wagons to haul people to work during the 1955-56 bus boycott that Rosa Parks triggered was someone we wanted to chronicle.
Edge and his cronies at the Center for Southern Culture are doing some of the most compelling and imaginative work on the intersection of food and community. They are a deep well of oral history, thinkers who have been a rich resource for the Hidden Kitchens series.”
Read more of the article on the PBS website.
Dietra Hawkins and Rafia Zafar
"The Club from Nowhere: Cooking for Civil Rights" courtesty of NPR and The Kitchen Sisters, 2005