Montgomery’s Georgia Gilmore Fed The Civil Rights Movement

By Bob Blalock

The Montgomery Bus Boycott helped define the civil rights movement. The city’s blacks, angry over years of mistreatment and the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to relinquish her seat to a white man, quit riding city buses. They carpooled, rode wagons and mules and walked to work for more than a year before achieving victory.

The bus boycott also helped define Georgia Gilmore. The Montgomery mother of six, a cook at National Lunch Company, had quit riding the buses in October 1954, more than a year before Parks’ arrest.

“Gilmore had begun her own boycott after a Friday afternoon rush-hour confrontation with a white driver who shouted her down for entering the front door of the bus and drove off before she could walk around back,” John T. Edge wrote in “The Potlikker Papers, a Food History of the Modern South.”

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