Quilting & The African American Story
A surprise on a Saturday morning and a trip into our collective history
I’m riding solo this weekend, so I thought I would stop by my local library, walk, and catch up on some reading. I ended up getting more than I bargained for. To my surprise, The Gee’s Bend Quilters hosted a special quilting session and sang freedom songs. Here is a little bit about Gee’s Bend and their quilting tradition from their website.
“The residents of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, are direct descendants of the enslaved people who worked the cotton plantation established in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the Civil War, their ancestors remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers. In the 1930s, the price of cotton fell, and the community faced ruin. As part of its Depression-era intervention, the Federal Government purchased ten thousand acres of the former plantation and provided loans enabling residents to acquire and farm the land formerly worked by their ancestors. Unlike the residents of other tenant communities, who could be forced by economic circumstances to move—or who were sometimes evicted in retaliation for their efforts to achieve civil rights—the people of the Bend could retain their land and homes. Cultural traditions like quiltmaking were nourished by these continuities.”1
For those of you who don’t know, quilting has an important place in the history of Black people in America. It’s been used to record and document racial terror, like in the case of LaShawnda Crowe Storm and her Lynch Quilts Project. “The Lynch Quilts Project is a community based effort, which explores the history and ramifications of racial violence, specifically lynching, in the United States through the textile tradition of quilting. The project consists of a series of six quilts tackling the lynching phenomenon from various perspectives such as collective memory, communal conflict, gender, healing and politics. The quilts combine a variety of traditional and contemporary quilting techniques to examine how the past, present and future are intricately connected.”2
There is also a debated belief that quilts were used as guideposts and signs on the Underground Railroad. Some believe that “safe houses along the Underground Railroad were often indicated by a quilt hanging from a clothesline or windowsill. These quilts were embedded with a kind of code, so that by reading the shapes and motifs sewn into the design, an enslaved person on the run could know the area’s immediate dangers or even where to head next.”3
In 2019, I had the opportunity to visit the Lynch Quilts Projects exhibit at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. Viola Ratcliffe of Bib & Tucker Sew-Op took a coworker and me through the exhibit. The experience stayed with me and marked me by the racial terror perpetuated on People of Color throughout American history. This is a brutal history, but one that many people suffered physical, moral, and psychological injuries to tell in the pursuit of justice. People like Ida B. Wells, an investigative journalist of the late 19th and early 20th century, spent her life documenting lynching and fighting for civil and human rights. Mrs. Wells “published her findings in a pamphlet and wrote several columns in local newspapers. Her expose about an 1892 lynching enraged locals, who burned her press and drove her from Memphis. After a few months, the threats became so bad she was forced to move to Chicago, Illinois.”4
Thank you to everyone who sacrificed to ensure this history is remembered forever. Thank you to those who have gone before us, our ancestors that gave their lives so that we could experience freedom and know what it means to thrive. I'm glad that I had the opportunity to see the work of these storytellers, artists, and historians.
https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-quiltmakers
https://www.thelynchquiltsproject.com/about-us
https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/underground-railroad-quilt-codes
Arlisha R. Norwood, NWHM Fellow | 2017https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/ida-b-wells-barnett