Freedom Quilting Bee
The Freedom Quilting Bee was a quilting cooperative based in Wilcox County, Alabama, that operated from 1966 until 2012. Originally begun by African American women to generate income, some of the Bee's quilts were displayed in the Smithsonian Institution.
History
The Freedom Quilting Bee was a quilting cooperative with members located throughout the Black Belt of Alabama. Black women created the cooperative in 1966 to generate income for their families.In December 1965, the Episcopal priest Francis X. Walter was in Wilcox County when a quilt on a clothesline outside a small home caught his eye. He had long been fascinated by American folk art and was interested in the quilt's bold design. The women began selling their quilts to Walter, who purchased them for $10 each. Walter was a priest who was returning to the area as part of the Selma Inter-religious Project. He received a $700 grant and traveled through the Black Belt, looking for quilts that a friend of his would sell in New York at auction. In the early stages, before the Freedom Quilting Bee was fully formed, quilts were sometimes made for sale in New York, while others came from the quilters' own beds or even family heirloom quilts from storage closets, sold to Father Walter because of the need for money for their families. Originally, Father Walter intended on using the majority of the extra money earned from the quilts once they were sold at auction to fund the Wilcox Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the remainder to be paid to the quilters themselves. Upon reflection, Father Walter noticed that there could be a need for a quilting co-operative, and he decided that the artists themselves should receive the money from the auctions.
After the first auction in New York City, the quilts gained critical acclaim and popularity, prompting the craftswomen to organize an official quilting cooperative. Thus, the Freedom Quilting Bee was formed, and more than 60 quilters attended their first meeting in a local church in March 1966. As an alternative economic organization, the Freedom Quilting Bee is part of a history of collective economic work of Black Americans. These alternative economics were used to raise the socioeconomic status of poor Black communities by allowing them to continue working in their own communities, while also reaching people across the country with their art. During the late 1960s and 1970s, the cooperative changed its operations to increase profits through a more mass-market oriented model. New Yorker Stanley Selengut was hired as the industrial development consultant. Working for travel expenses alone, he brought their quilts to New York City and helped the cooperative make deals with Bloomingdales and Sears.
On March 8, 1969, the Bee began construction on the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Sewing Center, designed by architect Martin Stein gratis and funded by small philanthropic foundations and through an interest-free loan from the American Friends Service Committee in Atlanta. The 4500-square-foot building was constructed by the husbands of the quiltmakers and other nonprofessional workers because the project only had funds to pay one skilled builder. Finding a property to buy was difficult, because Southern whites refused to sell to Black people. The sale of the land to the Bee's members had been so unlikely that they bought all they could, 17 acres, with plans to resell parcels to other Black people, who were largely shut out of the real estate market.
In 1970, Reverend Xavier found a white Catholic nun, Sister Catherine Martin, to help with office duties such as typing, invoicing, and bookkeeping twice a week. Martin helped the Bee establish a system in which the women were paid for piecework they did on the Bee's larger contracts. Some of the women had never had an opportunity to be paid for their labor prior to this; the Bee's payments enabled them to raise the standard of living for themselves and their families.
In the early 1970s, Mary Boykin Robinson helped found, and became the director of, the Freedom Quilting Bee Daycare Center, which served the children of the mothers who worked for the Bee. The Daycare center was open from 1970–1996.
Membership in the Freedom Quilting Bee dwindled in the 1990s and the community space they used was damaged by weather. In 2012, a year after the last original board member died, the Bee officially closed. Although it is commonly confused with the Quilters of Gee's Bend, the Freedom Quilting Bee was a separate organization with a similar mission and overlapping membership.
File:Mary Lee Bendolph, Loretta Pettway und Lucy Mingo 2015.jpg|thumb|355x355px|Mary Lee Bendolph, Loretta Pettway, and Lucy Mingo in 2015
Influential members of the Freedom Quilting Bee include Willie "Ma Willie" Abrams and her daughter, Estelle Witherspoon. Both women come from the town of Rehoboth, Alabama, which is ten miles north of Gee's Bend and a hub for the Bee. Abrams, a talented quilter, produced many of the quilts sold, and was instrumental to the Bee in its formative years. Witherspoon, an influential political leader in Rehoboth, worked as the head manager of the organization for over twenty years. Other important founding members were Minder Pettway Coleman, Aolar Carson Mosely, Mattie Clark Ross, Mary Boykin Robinson, China Grove Myles, Lucy Marie Mingo, Nettie Pettway Young, and Polly Mooney Bennett. Mary Lee Bendolph of Gee's Bend also participated briefly.
Artists of the Freedom Quilting Bee
Minder Pettway Coleman
was born in Wilcox County in October 1903, and lived just one mile from Gee's Bend in the Quilting Bee's hay day. Minder learned to quilt as a small child, and soon realized she had a knack for the art. Mrs. Coleman was a farmer her whole life, and also spent some years working at a cloth factory, and later an okra factory. While working at the cloth factory, she would collect the discarded scraps of fabric, and save them for use in her quilts. She also frequently used flour and fertilizer sack fabric in her quilts.Once she joined the Freedom Quilting Bee, she donated the scraps she had collected to her fellow quilting artists. Minder's most famous quilting style is the Double Wedding Ring; she also created her own pattern that resembled two eggplants joined together. Mrs. Coleman did not receive pay for her work for the Freedom Quilting Bee Co-operative, nor did she receive money for the sale of her quilts. She instead gave the money to the Quilting Bee to be used for the creation of a new center for the quilters. Mrs. Coleman continued to work full-time for the Bee until 1978 when her husband became ill, and subsequently died later that same year.
Aolar Carson Mosely
Born in May 1912, Aolar learned to sew at the young age of eleven, when she sewed a dress for herself that her mother had cut out to be sewn. Aolar used a sewing machine both then, and when she quilted. It wasn't until the age of twelve though that Aolar made her first quilt. Aolar's mother was a quilter herself; as a small child Aolar along with her siblings helped collect the materials for her mother to use as quilting frames. They would collect the wood from nearby forests, and their father would fashion them into the quilting frames. Aolar was unable to finish school past fifth-grade as her family was unable to afford to send her. Aolar married Wisdom Mosely, a farmer, in 1929 at age seventeen. Together they had seventeen children, only thirteen of whom survived childhood.While Aolar did quilt herself, much of her contributions to the Bee involved managing and tutoring others. She also contributed by making meals for the co-op members, and by completing small tasks such as framing quilts. Mrs. Mosely worked at the co-op until 1981; after this point she continued to work at the sewing center as a volunteer. In the fall of 1984, Mrs. Mosely's home burned to the ground, destroying all of her belongings and remaining quilts. However, within a few months, her grandson, a brick mason, re-built her a home on the same land as a gift to his grandmother, who had sponsored his education.