The pastry chef David Benton grew up in a pumpkin pie family; they always bought the dessert for Thanksgiving dinner.
So he was thrilled whenever someone gifted 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 Oakland, an online bakery in California. He grew up before Patti LaBelle’s sweet potato pies became a staple at Walmart.
In the 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 Smith II explores how food was both weaponized and used as a tool of resistance in the struggle for Black equality, telling the story of the activist and cook Georgia Gilmore – whom he calls an unsung civil rights heroine for the way she used sweet potato pie to advance the cause.
A cook at a popular Montgomery, Alabama, restaurant, 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. She enlisted her friends to bake and sell food too. When asked where the money came from, she answered, “nowhere”, so her secret baking crew was dubbed the Club From Nowhere.
“She was using it as a way to dismantle white supremacy,” says Smith, who teaches at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “Her arsenal is filled with recipes and … culturally appropriate food.”
When Dr Martin Luther King Jr was indicted for violating an Alabama law forbidding boycotts, Gilmore testified in his support. Her job fired her, so King gave her money to start a home restaurant.
Her home in Montgomery became a headquarters where civil rights activists and leaders relaxed, refueled and made plans over her home-cooked fried chicken sandwiches, pork chops, lima beans and greens. Even presidents Lyndon B Johnson and John F Kennedy were patrons. Her home joined a circuit of safe-space restaurants for civil rights activists that included Paschal’s in Atlanta, Dooky Chase in New Orleans, and Big Apple Inn in Jackson, Mississippi.
“Georgia Gilmore wasn’t just serving a hot lunch. It was a lunch rooted in African American foodways,” Smith says. “And we know … that sweet potato pie is oftentimes a central actor in those foodways. It’s a way to keep Black people on [activists’] minds, even if they’re not thinking about the food that deeply. It’s doing the work.”
Though sweet potato pie resonates with Black people, they didn’t invent it, says Michael W Twitty, a James Beard award-winning food historian. Perhaps because they were a reputed aphrodisiac, King Henry VIII was fond of sweet potatoes. “Henry ate his sweet potatoes in heavily spiced and sugared pies,” writes Larry Zuckerman in his book, The Potato: How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World. A citation on foodtimeline.org says pies of this time might have had a crust on top made from flour mixed with suet, lard or butter; Henry’s sweet potato pie might also have contained meat, Twitty says.
However, Black cooks in the south perfected the pie, leading to the dessert we know today, with its distinctive single crust and caramelized flavors. Abby Fisher, an Alabama chef who cooked for San Francisco society women, published the first sweet potato pie recipe in her 1881 book What Mrs Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking. Her compact proto-recipe tells the reader to boil 2lbs of sweet potatoes until soft, peel and mash them, then add a tablespoon of butter, five beaten eggs, a half-cup milk, sugar to taste, the juice of an orange plus half of its zest and a little salt. Then pour it into a single pie crust and bake quickly.
In their homeland, Africans ate yams (Dioscorea rotundata), another starchy tuber, and thought the sweet potato (Ipomoea batata) was inferior, calling it “the white man’s yam”, Twitty says. But finding themselves in a strange land, enslaved Africans in the Caribbean, Latin America and US embraced the nutritious sweet potato, whether it was orange Beauregard or Porto Ricos or rare white Haymans. “The most important starch tuber vegetable was the sweet potato,” Twitty says.
In the south and beyond, roasted sweet potato could evoke the same type of visceral reaction as Proust’s madeleine. Free time was rare for enslaved people, so a pie was a treasured delicacy. “When marginalized people adopt a food … [it’s because it] makes you feel a certain way,” says Twitty, whose sweet potato pie recipe in The Cooking Gene is flavored with spiced rum, sorghum and nutmeg. “That feeling during enslavement of: ‘We don’t have a lot of joy in our lives, but this gives us joy.’”
Subversive sweet potatoes
Every time there’s a special event at Bethune-Cookman University, a historically Black college in Daytona Beach, Florida, sweet potato pie is on the menu. That’s because the university’s founder, Dr Mary McLeod Bethune, sold sweet potato pies to raise money for her first school, the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training Institute for Negro Girls.
Bethune would dress up and bicycle over to Beach Street, an affluent commercial area where Black folks were not all that welcome in 1904. Selling sweet potato pies spiced with nutmeg and vanilla, she met the oil tycoon John D Rockefeller, who made a $62,000 donation (worth $2.2m today) to her school. Pie also led to a donation from James Gamble, co-founder of Procter & Gamble, says Dr Clarissa West-White, archivist at Bethune-Cookman University.
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“We know she baked pies as a way to not only raise money for the school but also have a conversation. It was a clever marketing piece,” says West-White. “She was able to get invited to meet other people who may not have been that thrilled about creating a school for Negroes. It was subversive.”
Bethune also targeted her message for her audience. She told them that she would be teaching domestic skills like baking, sewing and weaving; she omitted the part about English and Latin and other facets of liberal arts education she envisioned.
Later in life, Bethune rarely cooked, but the pie story remains as an example of her ingenuity. “It’s an example of how you can use something that seems pretty basic to really change history,” West-White says.
That’s not to say pumpkin pie doesn’t have its own cultural meaning. The pie was linked to northern ways thanks to Sarah Josepha Hale, an influential 19th century New Hampshire poet and magazine editor. Her columns advocated for the abolition of slavery and for Thanksgiving to become a national holiday. She deemed pumpkin pies “an indispensable part of a good and true Yankee Thanksgiving” in her 1827 novel, Northwood. When Abraham Lincoln made the holiday official in 1863, some southerners eschewed both Thanksgiving and pumpkin pie, clinging to their beloved sweet potato confection.
Comfort through pie
Sometimes the taste of a sweet potato pie is what you need to get through a rough time. As Dr Martin Luther King Jr signed copies of his book Stride Toward Freedom: the Montgomery Story at a Harlem department store in 1958, a Black woman with a psychiatric illness stabbed him with a letter opener. The blade stopped just shy of his aorta, and doctors performed a four-hour surgery to save his life. In a phone call after the surgery, ML, as his family called him, asked his sister-in-law Naomi Ruth Barber King for one of her pies. His wife, Coretta, had the pie flown to the Harlem hospital. When she checked in on him, he told her: “I’m doing great because I’m sitting here eating your sweet potato pie.”
In suburban Minneapolis, Rose McGee says she too learned how pie can brighten the darkest moments. Feeling distraught after Ferguson, Missouri, police killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old Black man – and seeing a community in crisis – she started baking, joining in a family tradition. “I was doing it usually just to uplift people,” she says. “I made a calling of it in 2014.”
McGee baked 30 pies made with her signature seasonings that include ginger, lemon extract and cinnamon, and then she and her son made the eight-hour drive from Minnesota to Missouri to share them. In a post for King Arthur Baking, McGee tells the story of meeting a young girl who was mourning alone at a makeshift memorial. McGee talked to her for a while, and asked if she would like a pie. “What happened next rendered me speechless. She held the pie, rocked it, and began to cry. We both did,” McGee writes.
She knew she had found her calling. Her nonprofit organization Sweet Potato Comfort Pie promotes healing, builds community and elevates Black people. She and fellow volunteers have shared thousands of pies with people who have suffered violence, from the family of Philando Castile to the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after the 2018 shooting.
They’re gearing up to bake 96 pies for their signature event, the MLK Holiday Weekend of Service, in January 2025. Volunteers come together and bake a number of sweet potato pies to match Dr King’s age. The reaction they see when they gift their pies proves sweet potato pie isn’t just pie.
“It’s a mnemonic device that reminds you where you’re from, who put love into this dish, who brought this dish to church supper,” says Twitty. “It reminds you of the people who made it, their names and stories. And it’s reminding you of the power of the Black contribution in American civilization.”
