Sweet Potato Pies Deliver Comfort to Conversations on Race
Every year a Golden Valley woman organizes an event on Martin Luther King Junior Day where they hope a slice of pie can make a tough conversation a bit easier. This year, Lunds & Byerlys donated enough ingredients to make 90 pies, which is how old Dr. King would have been this year.
Sweet Potato Comfort Pies founder Rose McGee collected the ingredients from the Golden Valley store manager Todd Moffitt. He says he’s delighted to play a part in the event.
“The pies are a vehicle,” he says. “Anything that helps us understand each other better and makes us stronger as a group of individuals, I think is just a wonderful thing to be a part of.”
Volunteers make the pies on Saturday, and then Sunday’s event at Brookview Community Center will be what organizers call a tough conversation about diversity. This year’s conversation will have extra meaning because of a recent incident in the city. Two copies of an anti-Semitic book were left in Little Free Libraries. At least one person reported receiving a flyer with the same message.
“The dialogues will probably touch around that,” says McGee. “There are people who are in total denial right now in our city, who don’t believe that these kinds of things would exist. ‘That’s just not true, that would not happen.’ But it does.”
The conversation, and of course the sweet potato pie, is open to anyone who wants to attend. It’s at Brookview Community Center on Sunday from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.
