The Sew Their Names Quilt Project, Lowndes County, Alabama

Abstract This essay examines two narrative quilts made in 2021 and 2022 by Black- and white-descendant communities in Alabama working together to memorialize names of enslaved persons drawn from previously un-transcribed antebellum Baptist church records, as well as from participants’ own recollections of enslaved persons associated with their families. The essay uses interviews to document the quilters’ experiences in sewing these quilts, describes the quilts’ construction and imagery, and argues that these works represent a quiet but powerful counter-memorial to the state’s ubiquitous stone and brass monuments to the Confederate dead. It maintains that a modest grassroots counter-memory movement in a forgotten rural area can be as compelling as large-scale urban projects such as the Equal Justice Initiative installations in Montgomery, which are beyond the capacity of most citizens to initiate, and suggests that the unique community that produced these works may itself constitute a living counter-monument that is even more extraordinary than the quilts.