Hello, Guideposts, I’m Rose McGee, and I live in Golden Valley, Minnesota. I’m founder of Sweet Potato Comfort Pie. And Sweet Potato Comfort Pie, we consider it as being a catalyst for caring and building community.
I consider the Sweet Potato Pie to be the secret desert of black culture. And when I grew up in the rural South of Jackson, Tennessee, it was something that was always in the center of things. My grandmother and my great grandmother would make those pies anytime there was a funeral or if it was a celebration or somebody had made a baby, they would carry pies.
I was inspired to make sweet potato pies after I watched on television, like many people, what was going on in Ferguson, and I was very, very concerned after the killing of young Michael Brown, Jr. and I wanted to do something but I didn’t know what.
But suddenly I got this voice that came to me that said, Make some sweet potato pies. So that’s what I did. I made 30 of them, loaded them in my car and my son and I drove down to Ferguson, Missouri. When I arrived to Ferguson, the initial protesting had ended but I noticed a few people and I was able to walk up and ask if they’d like to have a Comfort Pie and explained it to them and surprisingly, they were very receptive about that.
I’ve traveled to several places across the country with the pies, but after the killing of Mr. George Floyd, it brought me right here at home again because we’d already been home when Philando Castile had been killed, We delivered pies. When Jamar Clark was killed right here in Minneapolis, we delivered pies. And since then, with the focus on Mr. Floyd’s death, we’ve been able to carry pies in so many different aspects of the community because so many different levels of community have been impacted. And I just say all the time, I just wish, I just wish I could just make one big pie that could satisfy the pain that we have across our communities. It’s a complicated desert and certainly needed now for complicated situations.
