The Sew Their Names Project
Lowndes County Community Life Center
126 Snow Hill Drive
Ft. Deposit, Alabama, 36032
A quilting project in the rural Black Belt of Alabama brings communities together in the spirit of truth and reconciliation to commemorate the erased and forgotten lives of enslaved persons by stitching their names into memorial quilts, and telling the history of the Southern antebellum church’s support for slavery.
Honoring Enslaved Persons Through
a Southern Quilting Tradition
In November 2021, quilters in the small, unincorporated town of Mt. Willing, in rural Lowndes County, came together to embroider names on 3” x 5” fabric blocks in the outdoor pavilion at the Snow Hill Christian Church. But the Mt. Willing Quilters were not sewing the blocks for their customary bed or lap quilts, which they donate to charity as part of a quilting ministry begun in 2005 through Snow Hill’s partner, the Lowndes County Community Life Center (LCCLC). Instead, on this sunny November day, they were sewing the names of enslaved persons, including those of some of their own ancestors, for use in a very different kind of quilting project.
Most of the slave names that the quilters were embroidering had never before been seen by the descendant community or the general public. They were buried in old microfilms and a few ancient record books in the special collection of the Samford University library. Here is how the names were discovered, and how the quilters began the Sew Their Names project.
How the Lost Names Were Discovered
The antebellum Hopewell Baptist Church building—described elsewhere on this website—was donated in 2008 to the Snow Hill Christian Church by the last few remaining members of the Mt. Willing Baptist Church, the successor to Hopewell. One day, on a drive through rural Alabama, Dr. Carroll Van West—an architectural historian and the director of the Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU)—saw the ca. 1843 building, stopped, and alerted Snow Hill’s pastor, Rev. Dale Braxton, to the historical significance of the church. Soon thereafter, in 2015, Dr. Van West nominated the church for listing on the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage.
A few years later, Judge Susan Russ Walker, then a U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Middle District of Alabama in Montgomery, came across the Hopewell Church’s historical registry listing online. The founding pastor of the church (also described elsewhere on this website) was her great-great-grandfather, Rev. David Lee. Judge Walker got in touch with Rev. Braxton, and they began working together in late 2018 to restore the Hopewell Church and tell its story.
In 2019, the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University awarded Judge Walker a one-month fellowship to study the history of the Hopewell Baptist Church, and of the Southern Baptist church’s support for slavery. When she began her research at the archives of the Alabama Baptist Church at Samford University in preparation for that fellowship, Judge Walker stumbled on scores of forgotten names of enslaved church members tied to specific antebellum churches in the Alabama Baptist Association (ABA), the predominant Baptist association in the central Black Belt.
The names of enslaved persons are not commonly known in this country. The “slave schedules”—the census data for 1850 and 1860—show no names for these individuals, listing them only by number, gender, race, and age. Slave names are in fact quite scarce, rarely found in substantial numbers in the scattered documents that have survived, such as wills and plantation inventories. And they almost never appear in America’s memorial landscape, in contrast to the names of the Confederate dead, which still are widely commemorated.
Unfortunately, the Samford archives did not include the Hopewell Baptist Church books. But the mostly un-transcribed records from related churches in the ABA yielded scores of names for enslaved persons from Trickem, Benton, Burkville, Hayneville, Braggs, and Collirene in Lowndes County; Carlowville, Pleasant Hill, and Orrville in Dallas County; Montgomery and Hope Hull in Montgomery County; Wetumpka, in Elmore County; Shorter, in Macon County; and Prattville, in Autauga County. The records generally show only the first names of enslaved persons—like Winney, from Braggs; Peter, from Benton; or Lavender, from Collirene. Slaveholder names typically follow, such as Dempsey, “servant of” A. M. Calhoun in Carlowville; or Dave, “the property of” George Harrison in Montgomery. Most often, the names of enslaved church members appear separately from the white members, just as Blacks had to worship separately in church. Segregation prevailed in the membership rolls and minutes, as well as in the sanctuary.
Wini McQueen, Somebody’s Calling My Name (2022). Ms. McQueen’s quilts have been shown at the Museum of African American Folk Art, the Taft Collection, the Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, The Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, and the Williams College Art Museum. In 2020, her quilts were featured in a retrospective of her work at the Museum of Arts & Sciences in Macon.
Detail from Ms. McQueen’s quilt.
Clockwise from top left: Rev. Dale Braxton, embroidered name block, Wini McQueen, embroidered name block, Yvonne Wells, embroidered name block.
Yvonne Wells, Worshippers at Mt. Willing Church (2022). Ms. Wells’ work has been shown at Williams College, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the American Museum of Folk Art. It is in the permanent collections of the International Quilt Museum, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, where a large collection of her work was exhibited in 2022. She has received the Alabama Arts Award, the Alabama Arts Council’s Visual Craftsmanship Award, and a Governor's Award for the Arts.
Detail from Ms. Wells’ quilt.
Sew Their Names Begins
Rev. Braxton and Judge Walker wanted to find a way to honor these individuals and ensure that their names would not remain invisible. That’s when they thought of the Mt. Willing Quilters. Led by Rev. Braxton—and spurred on by the racial reckoning brought about by George Floyd’s death, which popularized the phrase, "Say Their Names,” coined to bring attention to victims of racial injustice—the quilters took up the challenge of embroidering these previously erased names on fabric quilt blocks, and asked others to join them. This was the beginning of the Sew Their Names Project.
The LCCLC secured grant support from generous funders, and commissioned two prominent Black quilt artists—Yvonne Wells and Wini McQueen—to create the first Sew Their Names quilts. The quilts were first shown at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art and the Auburn University quilt symposium in 2022, and they have attracted interest both statewide and regionally. The project also was presented by invitation at the Alabama State Council for the Arts’ Rural Arts Roundtable in Selma, in July, 2022, and at South Arts’ Folklife in the South conference in June, 2023.
Now that the first two Sew Their Names quilts are complete, the Mt. Willing Quilters are offering the program to venues around the state and region. The traveling exhibit will provide an opportunity for members of the public to join the quilters in sewing either the names discovered in the Samford archives, or those of other enslaved persons connected with their own families—both the enslaved ancestors of members of the Black descendant community and, for descendants of slaveholders, persons whom their families enslaved. Participants may bring fabric with them that has personal significance, or use the fabric provided by the quilters. No previous embroidery or quilting experience is needed. If participants choose to donate the name blocks they embroider, these may be included in future Sew Their Names quilts.
The program and exhibit will display the Sew Their Names quilts, and will also feature a documentary video about the project made by Montgomery, Alabama filmmaker Josh Carples. In addition, the Mt. Willing Quilters sing as they sew, so participants will enjoy—and may join in singing, if they wish—Black gospel standards such as Somebody’s Calling My Name, Precious Lord, Praise Him (Jesus Blessed Savior), and Jesus is a Rock in a Weary Land.
Bookings are limited. Please contact braxtondalesr@gmail.com for further information.
The Sew Their Names Project is made possible by grants from The Black Belt Community Foundation, the Alabama Humanities Alliance, The Alabama State Council on the Arts, and the Central Alabama Community Foundation. Research support for the project was provided by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.
Yvonne Wells image at top right by Kelly Ludwig. Other images by Jon Cook.
Why Sew Their Names?
By humanizing and honoring enslaved workers and ancestors, the ‘Sew Their Names’ project … memorialize[s] African American resiliency, community-building, and strength, while recognizing the violence and oppression black people have endured, past and present. The tactile nature of the project provides a creative avenue to touch minds and hearts while opening the memorial landscape to fresh modes of interpretation and expression.
— David W. Blight, Director, and Michelle Zacks, Associate Director, of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University
“When you do that [sew their names] you give someone humanity… To be able to sit down and say their name and then concentrate on their name and sew their name—not just whisper it, but to sort of say it out loud and scream it, I think contributes to their humanity and recognizes them as human beings.”
— Judge Lloria James,
Alabama 15th Judicial Circuit
Whatever God you acknowledge, you know that you’re recognizing that spirit of that individual when you’re actually sewing that name. And that person’s spirit can know that you’re reaching out to them and trying to acknowledge them.
— Judge Samarria Dunson,
Montgomery Municipal Court
A name is the most important thing you have; it stays with you for your life. If you go to a cemetary, there’s no body, there’s no bones, there’s no photo, there’s no history written. There’s just a name.” The Sew Their Names story is “not just the story of the people in Alabama—in Birmingham, Mt. Willing, in Montgomery—it’s the story of every Black person who came to this country by way of … wherever we were stopped and broken so we would be working machines.
— Wini McQueen,
Commissioned Quilt Artist
Your name is your identity. If you take a name, you take an identity. These individuals already had had so much stripped away. If you stripped their name, you know, what’s left?
— Gail Andrews, textile historian and former R. Hugh Daniel Director of the Birmingham Museum of Art
It’s the kind of national trauma that calls for contemplation and courage. One thing I hope that people take away from the Sew Their Names Project is to not be afraid to talk about difficult things about our culture and our society whether it’s in the past or whether it’s right now.
— Joey Brackner, State Folklorist, Alabama State Council on the Arts (retired)
They got a first name and then the slaveowner’s last name. But then their names didn’t mean anything because they were mispronounced, they were spelt wrong, the genders didn’t mean anything. You were property. When will we stop looking at ourselves as somebody’s property?
— Mary Godfrey, Mt. Willing Quilter
[Why] sew their names? You will remember them. It’s a transformation from unknown to known. And I thought that was the greatest thing, that someone remembered someone who had been lost, but now they are found.
— Yvonne Wells, Commissioned Quilt Artist
I thought about ‘sew their names.’ Do I really want to know who they are? Do I really want to dig into this thing called slavery again? But then I thought about my great-great-great-grandmother, grandma Bessie, who lived to be 105, who was a slave. She died when I was very young, but I do remember her. And she always said to us that we were somebody. So why not remember them? Because they were somebody, too.
