In 2014, when a police officer shot an unarmed man in Ferguson, Mo., touching off riots and distress over police violence against black people, Rose McGee watched events unfold from her home in Golden Valley.
"I'm sitting there watching TV and getting very frustrated, as other people were, and wondering what I could do," said McGee, 65.
Then she knew. She went into her kitchen and began baking sweet potato pies.
McGee had once sold homemade desserts, including sweet potato pies, "the sacred dessert of black culture." She quit the business after about five years, finding it too hard to juggle with her full-time job in professional development for the Minnesota Humanities Center.
This time, she didn't plan to sell the pies. She loaded 30 into her car — Sweet Potato Comfort Pies, she called them — and drove to Ferguson herself. She visited the site of Brown's shooting, where she met a grieving young woman who had known the young man.
"I asked her if she would take a sweet potato pie from me," McGee said. She held out a pie, carefully packaged in a gift box, decorated with a heart-shaped piece of crust and accompanied by a poem written by McGee's daughter.
The woman looked startled but accepted the pie. "It's so pretty," she said.
McGee continued handing out pies whenever she thought, "this person seems like they need a pie."