The Freedom Quilting Bee was a quilting cooperative with members located throughout the Black Belt of Alabama. Black women created the cooperative in 1966 as a way to generate income for their families. The women began selling their quilts at the suggestion of Father Francis X. Walter, a priest who was returning to the area as part of the Selma Inter-religious Project. He received a seven hundred dollar grant and traveled through the Black Belt looking for quilts to present at an auction. After the first auction in New York City, the quilts gained critical acclaim and popularity, prompting the craftswomen to organize an official quilting cooperative. The Freedom Quilting Bee, as an alternative economic organization, is part of a history of collective economic work of Black Americans. These alternative economics were used raise the socioeconomic status of poor Black communities. During the late 1960s and 1970s the cooperative changed its operations to increase profits through a more mass market model. New Yorker Stanley Selengut was hired as the industrial development consultant. Working for just travel expenses, he brought their quilts to New York City and helped the cooperative make deals with Bloomingdales and Sears. 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. Commonly confused with the Quilters of Gee's Bend, the Freedom Quilting Bee was a separate organization with a similar mission and overlapping membership.
Members
Influential members of the Freedom Quilting Bee include Willie "Ma Willie" Abrams and her daughter, Estelle Witherspoon. Both women come fromthe town of Rehoboth, Alabama, a town 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.
Critical acclaim
After the first auction in New York City the Bee quilts were picked up by Vogue and Bloomingdale's. When the art world began to take notice of the quilts they ended up in an exhibition in the Smithsonian. A New York Times review called the quilts "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced." The quilts have been compared to 20th century abstract styles which are much different than the common orderly American quilting styles.
Quilts
The Bee quilts were stitched from scraps of cloth using patterns reflective of the history of Black quilting in the area. The craft was usually learned from a mother or grandmother. Some of the scraps of cloth even came from old denim clothes that were too old to continue wearing in the cotton fields.
