MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Though it is well into fall, the beaming sun and sticky air of Alabama remain reminiscent of summer. It’s afternoon in Montgomery, a quiet Sunday afternoon, hours past when most are trickling out of church, and no line has formed outside of the Legacy Museum.

The only exception is a small group of women gathered outside the building, quietly conversing underneath a Maya Angelou quote splattered on the backside of the museum’s wall. The group consists of Bay Area food entrepreneurs from La Cocina, alongside facilitators Ashtin Berry and Eric King of Radical Xchange, who have come to Montgomery to learn about the city’s history with a piercing honesty.

Tiffany Carter, a chef from San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, is one of those women.

Since Equal Justice Initiative opened the museum in 2018, more than 400,000 people have walked through its doors absorbing the wealth of information dispersed through artwork, interactive screens, videos and short films on the themes of slavery, segregation, mass incarceration and the racial terror that was lynching — all exhibits that moved Carter many times to tears.

“Things haven’t changed much,” she said, hours later. “It’s too close to home.”

Carter is a daughter of the South. She has family in Mobile, Ala., and Lake Charles, La., and has lived in Atlanta. But the Bayview neighborhood has been home for her family for generations. “My grandparents on both sides were able to come here and work very hard to buy houses and build businesses,” she said.

Her family’s story is one of hundreds of thousands of stories about families that fled the South for either fear of racial persecution or lack of job opportunities. The Great Migration was one of the largest exoduses of black people from the South to elsewhere in the country, beginning in 1916 and the second wave occurring in the 1940s. Southerners left for new lives in Chicago, New York, Detroit and throughout California.

Carter started her culinary career selling plates at her uncle’s church. Encouraged by success, she decided to go to culinary school to learn both the cooking techniques and the business aspects of the food world. She attended Le Cordon Bleu and in 2017, her Creole food business was born. She called it Boug Cali.

Since its inception, Carter has held pop-ups in other restaurant spaces and most recently became one of the inaugural food vendors at the Warriors’ new Chase Center. In early 2020, she will be one of the featured restaurants in La Cocina’s forthcoming Tenderloin food hall.

On her menu you’ll find an assortment of po’boys, gumbo and burritos, all with Creole touches, an intentional decision to pay homage to both her family’s roots throughout the South and her own upbringing in California. She admits, however, that even though she has carried her family’s Southern history into her cooking, she often has to fight against expectations.

Namely, what others think she should be cooking as a black woman.

“I feel insulted when people put me in a box because I actually worked very hard at what I do as a chef,” Carter said. “I try to trailblaze out of that as much as I can. Like, ‘Hey I’m making tacos.’”

The diverse culinary influences of San Francisco are something Carter talks about a lot, and it’s only natural they would be reflected in the food she cooks. She also speaks openly about how the historically black neighborhood she’s from, the Bayview, is shifting further away from what she knew it to be as a child as her community moves out and newcomers move in.

Things are changing so quickly in the Bayview that as recently as two years ago, it was named one of the fastest gentrifying cities in the nation, according to a report by UC Berkeley. This shift was aided in large part from tech buyouts and what was touted as thinly veiled efforts of redevelopment complete with condo construction.

“People are getting pushed out further and further,” Carter said. “These gentrifiers that are moving into our communities aren’t supporting us.”

During our time together in Montgomery, I watched Carter muse over the heaviness of Legacy Museum, and later the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Montgomery was once the capital of the domestic slave trade, its proximity to the water making it an ideal location to traffic in Africans who became enslaved and torn apart from their families.

The trip resonated because of the stinging brutalities of the history of African Americans in this country, and how each day these truths don’t seem to lessen or change in how they are presented to us.

But it also resonated because movement, whether involuntary or not, has become a part of what has drawn Carter to cook.

Over the days, she went from being reserved to sharing her thoughts and feelings with others in the group. The Montgomery trip, a return to the South for her, filled her with more intention for the work she already does. She said that she wants to be seen for the chef she is, not wedged into simplistic categorization.

For Carter, the ultimate freedom is embracing a “re-education” where more black chefs are encouraged to hold their own personal and familial histories — and the way that being migratory is a part of that story — while venturing off into any culinary directions they so choose.

And for her, that freedom is the best way of honoring those who came before her and walked down similar paths.

Nneka M. Okona is a journalist living in Atlanta. Email: food@sfchronicle.com