
          The Freedom Quilting Bee
          By Ellis, DeborahDeborah Ellis
          Vol. 10, No. 4, 1988, pp. 22-24
          
          Both are stories of American business, but The
Freedom Quilting Bee is as different from the current bestseller
Trump: The Art of the Deal, as New_York City is
from Gees Bend, Alabama. While Trump's book celebrates the triumph of
individual success, Callahan's story of a rural sewing cooperative
emphasizes collective spirit. Success at the Freedom Quilting Bee is
not in making millions, but in creating minimum-wage jobs for black
women quilters. Callahan's absorbing account, which relies primarily
on extensive interviews with the quilters and outside supporters of
the cooperative venture, shows how the Bee cooperative has formed and
has been formed by those whose lives it has touched since it was
established in 1966.
          The Freedom Quilting Bee grew out of both the civil_rights movement
and the culture of the tiny, isolated Wilcox County, Alabama,
communities of Gees Bend and Alberta. It was the civil_rights movement
that brought the Rev. Francis X. Walter, a white Episcopal priest and
an Alabama native, down from New Jersey to head an interfaith civil
rights project in west Alabama. Walter had left Alabama in 1961 after
being refused work by the Bishop of Alabama because of Walter's
"interpretation of the gospel with regard to racism." He came
back to Alabama determined to help in a movement he realized was
overdue and necessary.

In December 1965, a few days after his arrival, he was lost on a
country road in Wilcox County and came across three handmade quilts
airing on a clothesline. He soon learned that many women in Wilcox
County quilted, and that their quilts were worked in a particularly
vivid and distinctive style. Walter's wife, a painter, observed that
"what distinguished Gees Bend quilts from all other American quilts
I had ever seen was their bold patterns. They had
self-confidence....These were extroverted quilts....They had so little
influence from outside that their quilting tradition was unique to
that isolated bend of the Alabama River."
          Gees Bend is an all-black rural community known for its isolation,
poverty, and unique cultural history. While the town lies just across
the river from Camden, the county seat, on a peninsula formed by a
curve in the Alabama River, there is neither bridge nor ferry
service. Consequently, it is over forty miles to Camden or Selma. This
remote area was settled in 1816 by Joseph Gee, a North_Carolina
planter, who bought most of the Bend and named it after himself. After
Gee's death the property passed to a relative, Mark Pettway. The
current inhabitants are descendants of the slaves owned by Gee and
Pettway and many Gee Benders still are named Pettway. Gees Bend's
isolation has "prevented insiders from leaving, and kept outsiders
from coming in," keeping the community all-black and culturally
homogenous. In 1937 a writer noted that "Gees Bend is an Alabama
Africa. There is no more concentrated and racially exclusive Negro
population in any rural community in the South than in Gee's
Bend."
          For the past 140 years the same group of people have cultivated the
land; only the land owners changed. In Callahan's words, some say the
black inhabitants "bought the land, then bought it again, then
again, and again: first as slaves, than as tenants, next as test-tube
members of a co-op (part of Roosevelt's Farm Security Administration),
and finally as qualified individuals fulfilling a bargain with one
more government group."
          People in Wilcox County were understandably suspicious of
outsiders. Walter succeeded in getting local women to join his
enterprise by offering them $10 per quilt-double what they previously
earned. At first, the quilters worked in their own homes, and the
quilts were sold at auctions in New_York held by friends of
Walter. The first sale, held in a New_York photography studio on March
27, 1966, drew only forty people but they bought forty-two quilts at
an average price of $27, and the Bee was on its way. Although the
original idea had been to donate any profit to the Wilcox County SCLC,
there was so much enthusiasm that it was decided instead to form a
quilting cooperative; in March 1966 more than sixty quilters attended
the first meeting of the new group. At the same time, Estelle
Witherspoon, a Gees Bend woman who had heard about the "preacher
going around buying quilts," wrote Walter to volunteer her help
"organizing ourselves to get these quilts sold." The cooperative
was incorporated in April 1966 with Estelle Witherspoon as president;
she has led the cooperative ever since.
          Those early auctions led to two important New_York
connections-Diana Vreeland, editor of Vogue, and
the nationally prominent interior design firm of Parish
Hadley. Vreeland and the Parish-Hadley firm were crucial to the
financial growth of the Bee. With their backing, the Bee's products
sparked nationwide interest in quilts and patchwork, which was soon
reflected in layouts in Vogue and House and Garden, and a promotion by
Bloomingdale's. The quilts struck a responsive chord partly because
their bold patterns reflected the popular taste in abstract art:
"The quilts had a dynamism resulting from their combination of
geometry and brilliance in juxtaposition of primary colors...such
opposition gave them a wonderful, almost Mondrian design."
          As the Bee's business grew, the product naturally changed. The
first quilts sold at the auction were made in designs handed down
through generations, with names such as Star of Bethlehem (also
"Stable Star"), Log Cabin, Climbing Vines, Stair Steps, Chestnut Bud,
and Pig in a Pen. They were made from scraps of material, many of
which were on a second life, having been cut from worn-out overalls,
flour sacks or discarded dresses. As the Bee developed, and especially
after a $20,000 order in 1968 from Bloomingdale's, the need to
standardize became apparent. In the beginning, the quilters did not
even have tape measures; now, colors, fabrics, backings and patterns
had to be standardized if higher levels of production were to be
possible. In addition, as time went on the Bee expanded beyond quilts
to make smaller items that were often profitable because they could be
made by machine; for example, in 1972 the co-op entered into a
long-term contract with Sears, Roebuck and Company to produce pillow
shams.
          In its first three years, members of the Bee sometimes gathered to
work together in each others' homes or in an old dog-trot tenant shack
that had previously been Witherspoon's home. The Bee's acquisition of
its own land and building in 1969 had both practical and symbolic
significance for its status as a permanent institution. With 

the help
of foundation grants and volunteer labor, the Bee built the Martin
Luther King Jr. Memorial Sewing Center. The 4,500-square foot masonry
structure stands out in the rural countryside. "To some, the
ultramodern facade...conjured thoughts of a giant spaceship from
another galaxy that landed accidentally on a sparse stretch of Alabama
cornfield."
          The success of the Bee must be evaluated in relative terms. In
Wilcox County more than 40 percent of family incomes are below the
poverty level. As one observer noted, "We're talking about Wilcox
County, where if there were no quilting bee, people would not be
working, period." The Bee has met its goal of enabling workers to
have a stable job where they make at least prevailing minimum wage and
can receive Social Security benefits. Its achievements also include,
beyond the quality of its quilted products, the fact that it is the
oldest handcraft co-op still in existence that originated with the
civil_rights movement. And as the quilters repeatedly voice throughout
the book, there are many benefits to working in a co-operative where
each member has a vote in decision making, where a daycare center is
part of the operation, and where pictures of Abraham Lincoln, Martin
Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy hang on the wall.
          In chronicling the story of the Freedom Fund Quilting Bee, Callahan
tells a story that needed telling, and she tells it well. Exhaustively
researched, the book goes beyond simply describing the growth of a
business to document in detail the Bee's relationship to the civil
rights movement as well as its importance in reviving national
interest in quilting. Callahan's text is illustrated with many
black-and-white and color photos of beautiful quilts. Her chapters at
the end of the book on individual quilters are filled with extensive
quotations in their own voices and are some of the strongest sections
of the book. Less extensive use of quotes, however, would have
benefited the earlier chapters, which are weighed down with extraneous
observations of outside supporters and helpers of the Bee.
          The Freedom Quilting Bee skillfully shows how
the institution is itself like a quilt, an everyday object that in the
hands of an artful maker transcends its utilitarian function and
becomes an object of great beauty. The Freedom Quilting Bee is more
than a successful small business; it is a symbol of how much can be
achieved by people working together. Like a quilt, the Bee has
endured. 
          
            Deborah Ellis works with the Women's Rights Project of
the ACLU, and previously was a lawyer in Alabama.
          
        
