Adapted from a story by Elazar Sontag for The Washington Post.
Over the next year, those last three words grew into a national movement. “I stopped being how I’m used to being,” Garza recalls, “which is relatively anonymous.” At her favorite restaurants, she would be approached by strangers, all of them weighing in on how the movement could change, be better, do more. The lack of privacy, the monumental expectations — they have made for a high-intensity life. So, to relax, Garza, 37, does what she has always done. She cooks.
Family recipes
In the kitchen, Garza often draws on tips her grandmother gave her, and things she saw her mother do. Her creamed corn, rich and comforting, was passed down from Garza’s grandmother to her mother, and then on to Garza. Corn and collard greens are often complements to the main dish, her fried fish. It’s a trifecta from her childhood. She cuts the onions her own way, and uses more of the collard stems than her grandmother would, but Garza doesn’t stray too far from the family recipes.
During her childhood, Garza and her family lived in the North San Francisco Bay area. Her mother worked a number of jobs — for the U.S. Postal Service, in a Macy’s stockroom, and as a housekeeper. Her days were long, and by the time she got home from work, it was usually too late to cook. On the dinner table many nights were takeout containers and microwave meals. Garza woke early on the weekends and made breakfast while her mother slept: eggs, cinnamon toast, bacon.
“She started to trust me in the kitchen, that I wasn’t going to burn it down,” Garza says, laughing. When her mother did have time off, she cooked all day, piling the table high with creamed corn, collard greens and Garza’s favorite: fried chicken. Each of those meals was a special occasion.
On quiet nights, when Garza is craving the flavors of her family, she makes these dishes or others from her mother’s table. Often, she cooks for Malachi, her husband and fellow activist. The kitchen is sometimes all hers. “It’s just me by myself, which I really like,” she says.
Conversations over nourishment
Since Black Lives Matter grew into a national movement, Garza has rarely been home for a stretch of more than three days. But when she is home, she cooks all the time. Sitting at her dinner table might be a handful of old friends, and one or two new ones, but they must be “folks who I trust immensely.” Although Garza is so often surrounded by crowds, her work sometimes feels shockingly lonely. “Some people only interact with you because they think you’re close to something that they want. Do you want to have a security system in your house? Do you want to get death threats by email?” It’s this side of Garza’s life that even her close friends rarely see.
When Garza is cooking, she has an “open-door policy.” Friends and colleagues whom she loves and trusts are welcome to come and share their ideas and hopes for the movement. But they’ll have to do so in her kitchen, while she tends to a pot of beans or makes her grandmother’s smothered pork chops. “There is something about being nourished that I think must change your biochemistry in a kind of way,” she says. “If I need to have a hard conversation with someone, I’d way rather do it over food.”
‘Food sustains movements’
It’s with this same spirit that cookbook author Julia Turshen wrote her most recent book, "Feed the Resistance.” “Kitchens and dining room tables aren’t just places to make food,” says Turshen, who has written about recipes for The Washington Post and whose writing often centers on social causes and calls to action. “They’re also safe and familiar places to gather, connect, organize, plan and to recuperate. Food not only changes the feeling in a space, it also shifts behavior. When we feel safe and comfortable, we’re free to have uncomfortable-but-important conversations.”
Garza’s inclination to organize and plan over food is deeply personal. Yet she follows in the footsteps of many great activists and leaders before her. “Food sustains movements,” says Fred Opie, author of several books and a professor of history and foodways at Babson College. “Food also starts movements.”
Over a plate of ribs at Aleck’s Barbecue Heaven in Atlanta, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. met with colleagues, strategized and planned his speeches. During the Montgomery bus boycott of the 1950s, Georgia Gilmore opened a makeshift restaurant in her Alabama home after being fired from her job for speaking out against the bus drivers. She sold poundcakes, pies and cookies at local businesses, and she started the Club From Nowhere, a group whose proceeds supported transportation for those boycotting the buses.
“There would not have been successful movements without the thousands of people who gave up their own, without any help financially . . . to buy food,” Opie says. “From fried chicken to cakes and pies made by members of the Club From Nowhere, there were literally thousands of people” baking and raising money.
Black Future Lab
Last year, Garza hatched the idea for a new organization. “This new project is all about transforming black communities into constituencies,” she says. Her goal for this work, part of what she calls the Black Futures Lab, is to build progressive political movements in small towns, major cities and, ultimately, nationwide. To better understand what communities need across the country, Garza and her team have launched a massive survey. To reach people who are often overlooked by online surveys — namely LGBTQ, immigrant and incarcerated communities — Garza has sent out organizers to collect responses in person. “It will be the largest survey of black people done since Reconstruction,” she says, matter-of-factly.
Her work has already helped elevate Black Lives Matter to a national platform. But even to Garza, creating another organization, with such large goals, seems overwhelming at times. How is she coping? Over lunch, of course. Before she and her team start their work, there is always a meal. “We don’t sit in a room and talk at each other. We break bread together. It’s a time for us to get present.”
At Garza’s table, a home-cooked meal is always the first order of business.
