More than a dessert How sweet potato pie became a tool of US Black resistance

The American pastry chef David Benton grew up in a pumpkin pie family; they always bought the dessert for Thanksgiving dinner.

- Maria C Hunt

So he was thrilled whenever someone gave them a sweet potato pie. "Sweet potato pie has a richer, more authentic homemade taste to it, and you could never find them in the store so people must have made those," says Benton, of Sugarsweet, an online bakery in California.

In the US's seasonal debate over whether pumpkin or sweet potato pie should be the signature Thanksgiving dessert, most Black people would vote for the latter.

For them, sweet potato pie isn't just a dessert. It's a pie with cultural power that connects them to family and the past.

This humble dessert - a deep orange mix of roasted potatoes, eggs and milk spiced with cinnamon, vanilla and nutmeg in a single crust - has also been used as a tactic in the decades-long struggle for Black civil rights in the US.

In his book Food Power Politics: the Food Story of the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, the sociologist Bobby J Smith II explores how food was both weaponised and used as a tool of resistance in the struggle for Black equality, telling the story of Georgia Gilmore - whom he calls an unsung civil rights hero.

A cook at a popular restaurant in Montgomery, Alabama, Gilmore stopped riding the bus in October 1955 after she paid her fare and the white driver left without her.

When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and the Montgomery bus boycott began in earnest that December, Gilmore was ready.

She quietly started making and selling food, including her sweet potato pies, to support drivers who were taking people to work.