Coming in 2025, Feeding Freedom: Lunch Counters to Michelin Stars, a new original film and book project from The American Table.
So, what is this new documentary about?
Georgia Gilmore, a 36-year-old Black cook, midwife, and activist, heard of a mass meeting at Montgomery, Alabama’s Holt Street Baptist Church, to organize a bus boycott after Rosa Parks was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white rider. She attended the meeting, introduced herself to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the president of the MIA, and joined the organization that night. It was Georgia Gilmore’s secret kitchen that fed the civil rights movement.
Gilmore sold her fried chicken sandwiches, mac’ n’ cheese, and other foods to the African-American men and women who met at the church and had vowed not to use buses until desegregated. Gilmore started a fundraising group called the Club from Nowhere (its name is a joke about where the money came from) to help pay for the alternative transportation system that rose during the 381-day bus boycott that ferried Black workers to their jobs and back. Gilmore's cooking helped pay for the insurance, gas, and vehicle repairs that kept the system going. She organized Black women to sell pound cakes and sweet potato pies, fried fish and stewed greens, pork chops, and rice at beauty salons; cab stands, and churches. Gilmore kept the movement funded and fed with food.
When she testified in court on King’s behalf, Gilmore lost her job at the National Lunch Company. King and other MIA leaders helped Gilmore set up her own restaurant in her home, which became a spot where Dr. King and other civil rights activists could eat and strategize. Robert Kennedy Jr. and Lyndon Johnson also ate there. Georgia Gilmore used food to feed justice.
Feeding Freedom: Lunch Counters to Michelin Stars is the dynamic companion book to the documentary feature film of the same name; it explores the rich and profound work that Black chefs have done from the beginning of America to today, where they are winning awards for their spectacular and succulent cooking—cooking we will see in action, and recipes we will share. In our literary and cinematic journey, we connect the struggles of the past with the culinary triumphs of today to see how Black chefs have put their souls on the table of America, using their talents in the kitchen to feed justice, and in so doing, to help the country find its way to that more perfect union the Founders imagined.
We see how Georgia Gilmore used food to win justice and how Booker Wright, a Black waiter in Lusco’s Restaurant in Greenwood, Mississippi, died because of it. In Mississippi: A Self Portrait, a 1966 NBC television documentary about racism in the American South, Wright spoke frankly about the racism he endured from his customers at an all-white restaurant, as well as his aspirations for his three daughters, who he hoped would grow up free from the prejudice he had faced. His interview aired just once, but Wright lost his job at Lusco’s and was pistol-whipped by a white policeman. His own restaurant, Booker’s Place, was firebombed, and he was murdered by a customer at his restaurant just three months after he spoke on camera.
Feeding Freedom explores the challenges Black chefs have had to overcome as they made their way to the national table. Civil Rights author and activist James Baldwin grew strength and power using the “Welcome Table.” His life narrative was energized by food, wine, and trusted conversation around his kitchen table in Paris. From Brooklyn to Paris, the journey for Civil Rights continues.
At the heart of our epic journey is an extraordinary Black chef starring in American kitchen—and soon, in one in Paris. We meet Mashama Bailey, executive chef and partner at The Grey, located in a converted 1938 Art Deco bus station in Savannah, Georgia. She won the James Beard Foundation’s Best Chef Southeast award in 2019. She served on the Edna Lewis Foundation board, which works to celebrate another renowned Black American chef, teacher, and author who helped refine the American view of Southern cooking. Mashama shows us her talents in the kitchen and treats us to some of her favorite recipes. Mashama learned to cook thanks to the women in her family, went to culinary school, and then lived and worked at Château du Feÿ in Burgundy, France, where she will return.
She will open her Paris restaurant –its name to be announced --in the city’s 7th Arrondissement space. The food will be French-focused but seasoned with the spirit of the American South. In bringing Black American cuisine to France, Bailey closes the circle begun by James Hemmings, who, as Thomas Jefferson’s slave, accompanied Jefferson on his posting to France in 1784. Hemmings trained in exalted French kitchens became a star and brought macaroni and cheese, French fries, crème brûlée, and ice cream to America. Now, Mashama Bailey will complete our story on an epic high note by bringing her foods of America to the diners of Paris. It will be a dining experience, très formidable, as they say in France or the American South, “We’ll be fixin’ to get seconds.”
Feeding Freedom: Lunch Counters to Michelin Stars takes the reader on a compelling journey through the world of Black American cuisine and into its very kitchens to taste how essential that cuisine has been to feeding freedom—and people – in the American story. And how the future of Black cuisine shines with a dazzle as it cooks on our national stove and beyond.
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