Ahead of the reopening of The Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers on 12 April, Alison Jacques presents a parallel online exhibition foregrounding the cultural impact and social importance of the Freedom Quilting Bee, a community cooperative born out of the civil rights movement that allowed quiltmakers in Alabama to earn money for their work, translating a centuries-old domestic craft into a viable economic enterprise. The show is organised in partnership with the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation and promotion of the contributions of African American artists from the Southern states.

On 9 December 1965, Father Francis X. Walter, a white Episcopal priest, was driving through Wilcox County, deep in the Alabama Black Belt, a region stretching across the centre of the state that is named for its dark and fertile topsoil. As the newly appointed executive director of the Selma Inter-religious Project, an Alabama civil rights organisation, Father Walter had been dispatched to collect testimony from Black families who, having publicly demonstrated for their right to vote, were facing bank loan foreclosures, eviction and jailtime.

As Father Walter travelled through Possum Bend, a small community on the Camden side of the Alabama River that was established in the late 1800s, he caught sight of a clothesline hung with three quilts, their patterns assertive, their materials varied, their colours magnificent. Having introduced himself to the creator of the quilts, Ora McDaniels, Father Walter enquired about other quiltmakers in the region and was led to the nearby town of Gee’s Bend, now known as Boykin, where he came across a tightknit community of women that was organised around a rich and storied quilting tradition that spanned generations.

Having gone door to door, marvelling at the complexity and originality of the textiles on display, Father Walter proposed auctioning the quilts in New York and redirecting the proceeds to the quilters through a cooperative. In the coming weeks, Father Walter borrowed $700 from the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity, purchased 70 quilts for $10 each, at least twice the going rate, and shipped them to New York. The first auction took place on 27 March 1966, in a photography studio near Central Park West. It was a success. More than $1,100 was forwarded to a new organisation established in Rehoboth, around 12 miles north of Gee’s Bend: the Freedom Quilting Bee. ‘God sent him through’, said founding member Polly Mooney Bennett of Father Walter, ‘cause the quilting bee have helped a lot of people.’

In the coming years, the Freedom Quilting Bee grew in scale and repute, with an increased awareness of such quilters as Loretta Pettway, Polly Bennett and Lucy Mingo thus generating an equivalent increase in demand. Under the strong leadership of Estelle Witherspoon, the Freedom Quilting Bee’s first president, the group’s work was displayed at the Smithsonian Institution, contracted by Sears department store to produce corduroy pillow shams and sold at stores such as Bloomingdale’s. Estelle Witherspoon was the guiding light for the Freedom Quilting Bee, traveling and speaking widely to promote the group’s cause until her retirement in the early 1990’s whilst also playing an active role in the Civil Rights Movement, participating in the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Having spent their early days operating from a shop in Gee’s Bend, the Freedom Quilting Bee eventually relocated to a purpose-built centre on County Road 29, a midpoint between Gee’s Bend and Alberta. Indeed, public and commercial interest was so significant that some herald the Freedom Quilting Bee for initiating a renaissance in the popularity of quilting in American interior design. In 1971, just five years after the first New York auction of the quilts, Jonathan Holstein and Gail van der Hoof opened the exhibition ‘Abstract Design in American Quilts’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art to critical acclaim.

In 1963, the Army Corps of Engineers had purchased around 2,500 acres of Wilcox County land in order to erect a dam on the Alabama River, which submerged a third of Gee’s Bend, marginalised cotton farmers and left many below the poverty line. As such, the Freedom Quilting Bee became a crucial, if unexpected, source of financial relief. But the cooperative also inspired an evolution in making practices in Gee’s Bend and Rehoboth. The commercial sector demanded consistent production standards and a uniformity of design, which increased the overall quality of the quilts, while new fabrics were delivered to Alabama to align the textiles with contemporary trends. While Gee’s Bend quilts had historically been assembled from salvaged materials, worn-out clothes and affordable samples, something exemplified here by Rachel Carey George’s use of denim and sacking material, the affiliates of the Freedom Quilting Bee were now working with corduroy, polyester, nylon and velveteen, not to mention Egyptian cottons produced by Liberty of London.

A number of quilters resisted these new standards. The Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers arranged their textiles into loose taxonomies that were reflective of their patterning or assembly process – these included ‘Medallion’, ‘Housetop & Bricklayer’ and ‘Lazy Gal’, illustrated here in the work of Loretta Pettway Bennett, Lutisha Pettway and Qunnie Pettway. Another, ‘Abstraction & Improvisation’, was colloquially referred to as ‘My Way’, and for a faction of the quilters, this was not only a categorising phrase but a creative philosophy. But for the majority, the influx of durable, malleable and wholly unusual materials opened up previously unavailable opportunities for experimentation. As is evidenced by the compositionally distinct work of Sarah Benning, Helen McCloud and Sue Willie Seltzer, these materials did not inhibit the aesthetic vocabulary of the quiltmakers but, rather, allowed them to enhance it further. Through these new fabrics, they found a new way to speak.

‘The quilting bee has done something for Gee’s Bend in a lot of ways’, quilter Aolar Carson Mosley told Nancy Callahan in 1987, ‘it’s done brought us a long way’. The Freedom Quilting Bee ceased operations in the 1990s; in 2011, Nettie Young, the last living member of the original Freedom Quilting Bee, passed away. But throughout its three-decades, the cooperative became a vital asset to the local area. Just as it brought residents together and validated their age-old craft, so too did it generate income, allow local quilters to qualify for social security and increase awareness of the more systemic issues that impeded the region. The Freedom Quilting Bee has left its mark on the Wilcox County, in this sense, on those who call it home, and it has left its mark on the quilts that continue to be produced in the region. Like most things in Gee’s Bend and Rehoboth, it will be remembered as a small yet vital block in a much larger quilt, the final design of which is yet to be determined.

The story of the Freedom Quilting Bee is preserved by the Freedom Quilting Bee Legacy, an organisation founded in Alberta, Alabama, to celebrate the work and accomplishments of the women who made the cooperative such a powerful artistic and social force.