page_title: Quilts of Gee's Bend
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Quilts of Gee's Bend / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Women from Gee's Bend work on a quilt during the 2005 ONB Magic City Art Connection in Birmingham, Alabama's Linn Park.Gee's Bend quilting bee
context_page_description: The quilts of Gee's Bend are quilts created by a group of women and their ancestors who live or have lived in the isolated African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Alabama along the Alabama River. The quilts of Gee's Bend are considered to be unique, and one of the most important African-American visual and cultural contributions to the history of art within the United States. Arlonzia Pettway, Annie Mae Young and Mary Lee Bendolph are among some of the most notable quilters from Gee’s Bend. Many of the residents in the community can trace their ancestry back to slaves from the Pettway Plantation. Arlonzia Pettway can recall her grandmother’s stories of her ancestors, specifically of Dinah Miller, who was brought to the United States by slave ship in 1859.
context_section_description: Just southwest of Selma, in the Black Belt of Alabama, Gee's Bend (officially called Boykin) is an isolated, rural community of about seven hundred inhabitants. The area is named after Joseph Gee, a landowner who came from North Carolina and established a cotton plantation in 1816 with his seventeen slaves. In 1845 the plantation was sold to Mark H. Pettway. This name still remains predominant in the county as many members of the community still carry the name. After emancipation many freed slaves and family members stayed on the plantation as sharecroppers. In the 1930s, Gee's Bend saw a significant shift in their community, as a merchant who had given credit to the families of the Bend died, and the family of this merchant collected on debts owed to him in a brutal way. These indebted families watched as all their food, animals, tools and seed were taken away, and the community was saved by the distribution of Red Cross rations. Much of the land of this area was sold to the Federal Government and the Farm Security Administration, and those organizations set up Gee's Bend Farms, Inc.-a pilot project that was a cooperative based program intended to help sustain the inhabitants of the area. The government sold tracts of land to the families of the bend, thus giving the Native and African American population control over the land, which at the time was still rare. The community of Gee's Bend was also the subject of several Farm Security Administration photographers, like  Dorothea Lange. During the latter half of The Great Depression the inhabitants of the area faced challenges as farming practices became increasingly mechanized, and consequently, a large portion of the community left.
  However, many inhabitants of the community stayed. In 1949, a U.S Post Office was established. In 1962, ferry service, one of the only accesses into Gee’s Bend, was eliminated, contributing to the community’s isolation. This elimination hindered residents’ ability to register to vote. Ferry service was not restored until 2006.
  From the 1960s onward, the community of Gee's Bend, as well as the Freedom Quilting Bee in nearby Alberta, gained attention for the production of their quilts. Folk art collector, historian, curator William Arnett brought further attention to this artistic production with his Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia, as he helped organize many exhibitions which featured their work.
  In 1965 Martin Luther King Jr. visited the area.
caption: Women from Gee's Bend work on a quilt, 2005
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