be the Georgia Gilmore you want to see in the world

The most dangerous woman in the civil rights movement didn't carry a sign. Uh she carried a skillet. In 1955, Georgia Gilmore was a cook at a restaurant in Montgomery, Alabama when the bus boycott started and she joined it. And for that, her boss fired her. So she started cooking from home. She made fried chicken. She baked pies. She sold cakes. And here's the part that really makes her a genius. She sold this stuff to everybody. black customers, white customers, it didn't matter. So if you were hungry and had a dollar, Georgia would feed you. And with that money, she was funding the destruction of segregation like one slice of pie at a time. And half her customers were on the wrong side of the issue who just had full stomachs. Uh she organized her neighbors, women from church, women from down the street into this network of cooks and bakers who all did the same thing. and they pulled every dollar they made into a club or a fund that she called the club from nowhere. From nowhere was because when people asked where the money came from, that was the answer. Nowhere. Nobody. Uh they just showed up. The club from nowhere became the financial backbone of the entire 381day Montgomery bus boycott. When the city tried to crush the boycott by pressuring insurance companies to drop the carpool drivers, the club's money just bought new insurance. They bought new cars and they kept 40,000 people moving for over a year. And Georgia kept a secret ledger of every dollar in and every dollar out that was hidden from the FBI and local police for the entire operation. And here's why she got away with it. The authorities were looking for militants. They were looking for men with megaphones and organizations with letterheads. And they weren't looking for a lady who was just selling pound cake. The state couldn't imagine that a woman's cooking could ever be a political weapon because the state had never valued women's work enough to see it as powerful. The sexism was their camouflage and it worked. That's the thesis of my new video. Fascism is a bureaucracy and resistance is a form of logist. And this is the thesis of my uh latest YouTube video. So, uh, check it out and of course, uh, be the Georgia Gilmore you want to see in the