The Alabama Experience; With Fingers of Love

You You You I woke up this morning with my mind

Stayed on freedom In 1966, a remarkable business spring up in Wilcox County, Alabama, one of the poorest counties in the nation. A group of middle-aged black women, with little education or business experience, formed the cooperative to market their unique handmade quilts to the art and fashion world. The freedom quilting being not only improved living conditions for its members, but inspired other co-operatives nationwide and fostered a new appreciation for quilts as an art form. Here is the unlikely success story of an organization created with fingers of love. There are a few of us who knows about our parents, you know, how hard it was for them to get it started, and how helpful it was for them that struck a harder to keep it going.

But then some of us were right here, don't even remember when it was started, you know, so they don't have no meaning for them. He would name it Freedom Quilting because it was free. I had all those in a body coming, and that's why we named it Freedom Quilting because he was free for everybody who wanted to come. The Freedom Quilting B was firmly rooted in the Civil Rights Movement. Its inspiration came from Francis Walter and Episcopal Priest who had returned to his native Alabama in 1965 to work for the movement through the Selma Interreligious Project. His efforts focused on the state's black belt region, including Wilcox County. There, as throughout the South, black citizens were being addicted from their homes and fired from their jobs in retaliation for registering to vote.

We were trying to get deposition from everybody who was being evicted with the idea that we could activate part of the Civil Rights Act that had just been passed that said you can't evict somebody for registering to vote. Not knowing the county, we drove down this rather small road and just ended up at the river bank with a couple of skiffs. We saw this house. There were these beautiful quilts hanging on the line. They were just like an op-art, which was popular then. I was really struck with how beautiful it was. Everett and I just said, let's just get out and go and talk to the woman about the quilts. When we got out of the car, this woman ran into the woods from out of the house and it was very sad and embarrassing. We had sense enough of them to know why. We were white and she didn't know who we were. She didn't trust us.

But the quilts gave Father Walter an idea for boosting the income of poor black families. It was pretty obvious with all this intense support in the North for the Civil Rights Movement that liberal people in the North, particularly artsy people, would probably like to buy these quilts. So I had a friend Tom Scriven who was from Alabama in real support of what I was doing in the Civil Rights Movement. I contacted him and he thought he could get an artist's law from somebody and have an auction. So I got word out on both sides of Alabama River that I would buy quilts. With a $700 grant in his pocket, Father Walter began buying quilts for $10 a piece. Because the average annual income of black families in Wilcox County was just a little more than $1,000, a single sale meant a 1% increase in a family's earnings. So I got from Highway 5 Alberta down to Gee's Bend. There really were quilts piled up on the side of the road and people standing there waiting. And I just drove up and handed out $10 bills and folded the quilts up and put them in the trunk and the back of my car.

And told people we would be got everybody's name and address and we'd be in touch with them later. So the break first, they have something we do without a hand to get some out of them. Because we wouldn't use the number to fear. We farm for our leave. We grew cotton in corn, peas and peanuts and sweet potatoes, sweet. See, that's all we know about. We didn't have no jobs here in the country like people doing cities. Among the many women father Walter Met was Mender Coleman of Gee's Bend. Mrs. Coleman had participated in the Gee's Bend Agricultural Co-op, one of the most successful economic development efforts of Roosevelt's New Deal. She told me that they had quilted, I mean woven cloth for a suit for Franklin Roosevelt.

And so she said, well, we could have us a quilt co-op or something like that. Well, I didn't know what a co-operative was legally. Father Walter had an attorney draw up papers for incorporating a co-operative. And on March 26, 1966, some 60 women gathered at the Antioch Baptist Church in Camden to form the Freedom Quilting Bee. Estelle with a spoon was elected president. I worked hard all my life. I heard of anything that would try to make this become better levels and better people in the community and everything. I really go fine. So I want things to be well with this and not only with me and my husband and my chair, I want to be well with people. And if I could do anything to help, I'll always try. The evening following the co-op's incorporation, a group of volunteers staged a first of two New York auctions of Wilcox County quilts. The quilts were pieced together from worn out dresses and overalls with old flour and sugar sacks as backing.

Elizabeth Walter, who was studying art at the University of Alabama while her husband worked for the Selma Interreligious Project, describes why the patch works caught the intention of New Yorkers. The Freedom Quilting Bee's bonus, not only in their design qualities and in their color, had an overall verve and a vibrancy to them that you rarely saw in Appalachian quilts or quilts coming say out of the Midwest. There was a movement toward minimalism within the New York art scene and these quilts from Wilcox County seemed to mirror the movement that the country was looking at in terms of avant-garde art too. They certainly were complimentary to the paintings of the period. The two New York auctions raised an additional $3,000 for the quilters and led to other valuable connections. The quilts caught the attention of one of New York's most sought-after interior decorators who ordered quilted fabric from Wilcox County to use in her designs.

The publicity that was generated by that one order was like a skyrocket going off. That was the real launching of the National Marketing effort of the Freedom Quilting Bee. For the next few years, home decorating features spotlighting Freedom Quilts appeared repeatedly in Vogue and other national magazines. Quilts, which Americans had cherished as central metal in sometimes useful relics of a bygone era, had suddenly become art and high fashion. In July of 1967, the Freedom Quilting Bee was invited to participate in the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival in Washington, D.C. It was the quilter's first trip outside Alabama. We put up our quilt exhibit on the mall and there were all these sorts of things going on. There were some black gospel groups singing. And somebody said, some of the women, including those women, said, the wing sing is good as they can.

So these four, you know, middle-aged women walked right up there in front of, oh, probably two, three thousand people in the mall in Washington and sang some of their church music. I always said I was going to quilt on Sunday. But when I got to Washington, this was zone. I quilted on Sunday. I quilted a little before and quilted five. Why? Because I felt the need of doing something to help bring something back here to keep us, keep on keeping on. During the first two years of the quilting bee's existence, Estelle with a spoon traded her role of co-op president for that of manager, sometimes receiving a paycheck, sometimes not.

Income from quilting was still just a supplement for the co-op members who continued to work in the fields to support their families. We didn't have no money to pay no matter too much or nothing like that because we paid by the quilt, you know. And five or six of us was quilting on the quilt. When we got the quilt, got the money back, we sent the quilt off and said it. And sometimes we got $2 a piece to take home. Sometimes we got a darn hay to take home. But it was good. But we weren't getting nothing. We used to be in pole. When you used this, we used to be in pole. Do you know, when I was a good, I used to wait from son-up till it down for 25 cents a day. When the husband began to say that he could do better at home by sitting there looking at them or whatnot, then come up here and make two rocks.

See what we were trying to do. We were trying to build this place. So if one day it's like we are now, we have more work to do than we ate. We moved toward regular income and a decent hourly wage. The quilters needed large contracts instead of the small, individualized orders they'd been filling. The catalyst for this transition was another New Yorker named Stanley Seligat, who had extensive experience in marketing handicrafts from around the world. Stanley is tall and had a big bushy red mustache and red hair and Mrs. Witherspoon is short and black and they just hit it off. Stanley said that she reminded him of a Jewish mother and Mrs. Witherspoon knew exactly what he meant. So she took care of Stanley. Offering to work for his travel expenses only Stanley Seligat visited department stores and other major retailers with samples of quilting be merchandise. Blooming Dells ordered $20,000 worth of freedom quilts and launched a major store wide promotion.

One of the sad things about folk art is that you cannot market a piece of folk art for very long without destroying and modifying it for the market. So here we had all these extraordinary quilts that artists were buying and even some art galleries were expressing an interest in but that would not sustain. The volume wouldn't be great enough. Up till now the quilters have been basically making one of a kind quilts using miscellaneous scraps. They now begin making the transition to a mass production approach with large fabric inventories and quality control. We know I think about the freedom quilting being those civil rights days and probably about more than half of the things that we projects that we worked on never worked.

It's almost like it's a very fertile soil and you throw a bunch of seeds in and some of them don't come up but the ones that do come up seem to just grow up in a big hurry. It went sweet all the time, you know. But just got a strong VM that you could do. You could make a difference. You could make things with. If you got that kind of mind, you will make things with. But if you give up every time something gets hard, you'll do nothing to do because you don't give up. In Alabama, private money and skilled hands have produced a better life for a group of Negro families, a report from NBC News Correspondent, Ali Insign. These scraps have come to me in the difference between despair and the hope for the future, between subsistence living and economic gain for 150 women here in Wilcox County, deep in Alabama's black belt.

They are members of the Freedom Building B Cooperative, a co-op which started three years ago and whose gross annual earnings have risen from $6,000 in 1966 to $22,000 in 1968. And in just the first three months of this year, they've made $21,000. This year's goal is $100,000. It was quite a few things that we've gotten since the culture of B began. We didn't have it. Like what kind of thing? Like I said, maybe refrigerators in our home, maybe washing machines in our home. We had just quite a bit more than what we had. Though business continued to expand, the quilting B was hampered by its lack of a central workplace. Most of the women quilted at home and few had telephones. Mrs. Witherspoon and her husband had converted half of their small home into a co-op headquarters, but more space was needed to cope with the steady stream of orders.

Early in 1969, through interest-free loans and grants, the Freedom Quilting B purchased a piece of land for the construction of a sewing center. Supporters from across the country were invited to the March ground breaking. Dear friends, just with the fingers of love that I call here to request the honor of your present active ground breaking of the sewing center. Oh, I feel like I'm breaking here. Oh, I feel like I'm breaking here. Oh, I feel like I'm breaking here. Oh, it was wonderful. We had singing, we had prayer, we had speeches, and one now, different preachers were coming, people from all over.

So happy, oh, I feel like we were so happy to be able to be able to be able to call out a weak place. And everybody was just, and people from all over the world. We had a few people from Africa who came to celebrate with them. By summer, a mostly volunteer construction crew had completed its work, and the quilters moved in to the Martin Luther King Junior Memorial Sewing Center. Just three and a half years after Francis Walter had caught sight of some quilts on the clothesline, the women of Wilcox County had their own sewing factory. I have studied to walk in the light shining. My day was happy because I had somewhere to go to work. I was happy that I had never had a job out of my home.

And I was happy to get up and go to work. It was happy days. It's all for play, to go, ready to go. In the years following its petty beginnings, the Freedom Quilting Bee established a daycare center, and obtained a long-term contract making pillow covers for Sears and Robux. It developed and marketed new products and found a secure outlet for its quilts through Artisan's Cooperative, an organization formed to assist groups of poor crafts people around the world. I give the impression that the Freedom Quilting Bee was the big thing in the Black Belt of Alabama, but it was a side show in a way. It didn't take up nearly all of my time. We were trying to keep people from being evicted. We were helping people to get registered to vote.

We were so hardwikers in the Civil Rights Movement, for the right to vote, and the right to live right in little onehood, not hate one. And so I marched, I stood for glance, I stood to your gaze. I went through all kinds of terrible things. I would not there for the heik no bad, I would not there to do no harm to no bad, I was there to help everybody, not one, but for all of us. And I felt like God was there. The Civil Rights Movement helped us. While we had go to these marches and different things, we went to Dr. Martin Luther King, far as we could fall in. And what he was saying was so true, you got to be together, both black and white, to succeed. As manager of the Freedom Quilting B, Estelle with a spoon has become one of the cooperative movement's staunchest advocates. She has been active in the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and has served on the Board of Artisans Cooperatives.

Her involvement in these organizations helped bring valuable training and support to the quilting B, and provided inspiration to other co-ops nationwide. Estelle with a spoon served as manager of the Freedom Quilting B until 1991, and observers both inside and outside the organization see her leadership as a key to the co-op survival. Ms. Witherspoon could take, you know, Stokely Carmichael, or somebody preaching revolution over here, and somebody just wanting to make a fashion designer in New York wanting to make a lot of money out of quilts, and she could just put them all together, and everybody would end up supporting the Freedom Quilting B. And nobody ever got mad at anybody, and she just had an extraordinary amount of tact and organizational ability.

She got to have a smile, love, and caring for the trying to get people to come in and work with you. And I'm not going to bring what I had a pretty good attitude that I would cry for my best of my will to accept whatever coming in, and try and ask God to give me wisdom and understand how to work with people. The Freedom Quilting B was one of the most miraculous, magical things that I have ever experienced in my whole life, where people of goodwill got together, had an idea, and decided to pursue it. And it worked. Why it succeeded was simply because people cared about its success. Over the years, the Freedom Quilting B has weathered times of economic difficulty to keep its doors open.

In fact, of the many handicrafts cooperatives that emerged during the Civil Rights Movement, the Freedom Quilting B is the only one still working today. Why is it that I like working here? Because of the people, the atmosphere, it's just a nice place to work, a nice place to be. It's a lot of love here. The people in the Quilting B, they've always worked together. They've had this, it's like this bond, you know. If something has to be done, and we know that this is our source of income, we're going to work together and try and accomplish that. This county is still cool. It's still one of the poorest counties in whole America, everywhere.

This is the only place right now in this community where the people don't have to drive almost an hour to get to work. I guess that's why we work so hard to keep the Quilting B going, at least it keeps a few of us working. Hopefully one day that we can hire even more. But competition from fine markets now threatens the Quilting B sales. Hand-stitched quilts based on traditional American patterns are imported from countries where workers earn pennies and hour, vastly undercutting the prices of US-made quilts. You know, we still sell a few, but not a whole lot of them to keep it going on. And right now we are trying to get into making these conference bags. Maybe that can generate more steady money. And then we can hire more.

We can get more money and more orders for Quilts bags or we can just about make anything. We are still in hope that we will continue to survive and keep on keeping on. And that we keep this Quilting B here for as long as the low able us to be here. I would like to be here for a long time because to see the progress of the Quilting B and hope that I can help with the progress of it. It's good enough for me. It was good for my old mother. It was good for my old mother. It's good enough for me.

A detailed history of the Freedom Quilting B by Nancy Callahan is available from the University of Alabama Press 1-800-825-9980. If you have a question or comment about this program or if you'd like to purchase a copy of it, please write the Alabama Experience $87,000 Tuscaloosa Alabama 35487. The word Quilts on your request. You may also call 1-800-239-5233.