Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

Among these activists was an Episcopal priest named Francis X. Walter. Unlike many white civil rights workers, he had been raised in the South; he was originally from Mobile, Alabama. In December 1965, he and a colleague were canvassing for Black voters in a small town called Possum Bend, Alabama. Walter spotted three beautiful quilts hanging on a clothesline outside a cabin. He wanted to find out who had made them, but nobody was home. (He later learned that their maker, Ora McDaniels, had simply fled when she saw two white men approaching her home, which gives a good sense of the racial dynamic in the region at the time.) Seeing them, though, gave him an idea. He started buying up locally made quilts with the intention of selling them up north, to raise funds for the community. The project quickly turned into a cooperative, led by Father Walter, in partnership with Estelle Witherspoon, the wife of a retired sharecropper. By the following March, sixty craftswomen were involved, calling themselves the Freedom Quilting Bee. Witherspoon coordinated the production and collection of the quilts out of her home in Rehobeth, but some of the most adept makers were from another Alabama community, called Gee’s Bend. They would attain nationwide fame in later decades, when their quilts made of work clothes and other reclaimed fabrics were rediscovered by collectors and museum curators. At first, the results of the bee’s handiwork were sold at small auctions in New York City for about...