She had just boarded and dropped her fare into the cash box when he shouted at her to get off and enter through the back door.

“I told him I was already on the bus and I couldn’t see why I had to get off,” she recounted a year later at the trial of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as quoted in the book “Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott” (1997).

But after collecting herself, she complied and stepped off the bus. Before she could get back on, however, the driver sped off. Right then she vowed never to ride the buses again.

Two months later, after another Montgomery bus rider, Rosa Parks, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white man — a pivotal moment in the civil rights struggle — Gilmore resolved to join a community meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church to talk about injustices toward African-Americans. She sensed that a movement was afoot.

She was right. About 5,000 people came to the meeting, on Dec. 5, 1955, including King. They vowed not to ride the buses until their rights as equal citizens were recognized.

Gilmore, who worked as a cook, decided she would use her culinary talents to feed and fund the resistance, which came to be known as the Montgomery bus boycott. She organized women to form the Club From Nowhere, a clandestine group that prepared savory meals (fried chicken sandwiches, fried fish, pork chops, greens, lima beans) and baked goods (peach pie, poundcakes) and sold them out of their homes, in local establishments and at protest meetings.

In a 1986 interview in “Eyes on the Prize,” the award-winning PBS documentary about the civil rights movement, Gilmore elaborated on the club and its name: “We decided that the peoples on the South Side would get a club, and the peoples on the West Side would get a club, and so we decided that we wouldn’t name the club anything, we’d just say it was the Club From Nowhere.”

The resistance lasted 381 days and involved weekly strategy sessions, protests and an improvised car pool system with 300 cars and dozens of pickup and drop-off locations — all of which utilized the hundreds of dollars that the club raised.

“You don’t hear Miss Gilmore’s name as often as Rosa Parks, but her actions were just as critical,” said Julia Turshen, the author of the cookbook Feed the Resistance (2017). “She literally fed the movement. She sustained it.”

Black women were vital to keeping the boycott going, Gilmore said in the documentary, “because, you see, they were maids, cooks.”

“And they was the ones that really and truly kept the bus running,” she added. “And after the maids and the cooks stopped riding the bus, well, the bus didn’t have any need to run.”

Georgia Gilmore was born on Feb. 5, 1920, in Montgomery to Janie C. Gilmore and Taylor Burns. One of seven siblings, she grew up on a small family farm with hogs, cows and chickens, which she took care of as a child, the food historian John T. Edge wrote in the book The Potlikker Papers: A Food History of the Modern South” (2017).

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Klancy Miller is a writer and pastry chef deeply fascinated by all things French. After graduating from Columbia University and working in international development in French Polynesia, she earned a Diplôme de Pâtisserie at Le Cordon Bleu Paris. Klancy stayed in Paris to apprentice in the pastry kitchen at the Michelin-starred Taillevent restaurant, and was later hired by Le Cordon Bleu Paris to join the recipe development team.