BRATTLEBORO — Students from Hilltop Montessori Middle School in Brattleboro are headed to Alabama in early April as part of their study of the civil rights movement. The trip includes stops in Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma, Ala., to allow students “to breathe, eat, and live the civil rights movement,” according to organizers.
One of the highlights of the trip is a visit with the Gee's Bend Quilters Collaborative. This year, in honor of the Gee's Bend community and their ongoing generosity, the students have made a quilt as a token of their appreciation, respect and friendship, which they will present during their visit.
(The quilting tradition in Gee's Bend goes back to the 19th century, when the community was the site of a cotton plantation owned by Joseph Gee.)
The Hilltop Montessori Middle School's visit to Gee's Bend is just one stop on an eight-day odyssey intended to bring home the reality that race continues to be a defining factor in the evolution of the American identity.
When in Alabama, the middle schoolers expect to visit the Civil Rights Memorial, sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the 16th Street Baptist Church, a central landmark in the Birmingham Civil Rights District that in 2006 was designated a National Historic Landmark.
Hilltop Middle School alumnus Colin Campbell recently wrote of his experience in Alabama, “The memory of the day I met Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth lives on inside of me as one of the proudest moments of my life. I can still picture myself standing in the old Bethel Baptist Church giving my speech. Looking back, I realize how significant a moment that really was for me.”
(Shuttlesworth, born Frederick Lee Robinson, was a U.S. civil rights activist who led the fight against segregation and other forms of racism as a minister in Birmingham.)
Focus on humanities
Hilltop's Middle School humanities curriculum focuses on adolescents' emerging interest in the workings of society, its obligations and structures, and the students' increasing responsibility in the world. The culminating event of this intense learning is their trip to Alabama.
Prior to the trip, students spend three months immersing themselves in the people, places, and events of the civil rights movement. Each student selects one individual to study who was influential during 1955-1970 civil rights era. Students also write a speech in the voice of their figure of interest.
According to Sarah Armour-Jones, Hilltop's director of development and communications, the trip to Alabama “is a pivotal part of the Hilltop experience” as students ”get a chance to see the civil rights era as a tangible reality.”
Armour-Jones said the students conduct much of their own fundraising to get to Alabama. Students run micro-businesses such as bagel lunches, a booth at the harvest festival, a soup sale, and a morning cafe. Through these activities students learn about the business component of financing a trip, and they get a sense of what constitutes civic responsibility.
Connected through quilting
Although students from Hilltop have been visiting Gee's Bend for 10 years, this year's students, for the first time in preparation for their trip to Alabama, have made the quilt which they will present to the Gee's Bend Quilters Collaborative. Each student worked on his or her own square, and the backing of the quilt will be finished when they get to Gee's Bend.
“Besides giving us a greater understanding of the reality we are about to embrace, the quilt also gives us some connection to the people of Gee's Bend,” says student Spencer Loggia.
Another Hilltop student, Lilliana Houston, adds, “Making a quilt for the people of Gee's Bend is a wonderful way to show respect for their amazing work and to leave a part of us there to be remembered.”
The Gee's Bend Quilters Collaborative consists of a group of women spanning four generations who live in an isolated, African-American hamlet located in southwest Alabama on a small parcel of land five miles long and eight miles wide, surrounded by a bend in the Alabama River.
Without a ferry service for decades, the residents were confined by the river unless they made the hour-long drive to the county seat of Camden, directly across the river from Gee's Bend.
Neal Conan, senior host of the National Public Radio talk show “Talk of the Nation,” writes, “Gee's Bend was named after Joseph Gee, the first white man to stake a claim there in the early 1800s. The Gee family sold the plantation to Mark Pettway in 1845. Most of the approximately 750 people who live in Gee's Bend today are descendants of slaves on the former Pettway plantation. Their forebears continued to work the land as tenant farmers after emancipation, and many eventually bought the farms from the government in the 1940s. Isolated geographically, the women in the community created quilts from whatever materials were available, in patterns of their own imaginative design.”
On Hilltop Montessori Middle School's first visit to Gee's Bend in 2003, students met Mary Lee Bendolph, a community matriarch. She told the students stories of life in Gee's Bend, especially after the ferry to Camden was removed to stop black residents from attempting to register to vote.
She also explained to the students of the power of quilting with her friends and neighbors, who had known each other since childhood. These relationships went back generations to the time when their ancestors had been slaves on this very same land. She remembers the time when when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Gee's Bend to see the “Freedom Quilts” made by the women of the community.
Touching different lives
Since their first visit, the Middle School continued to connect with Gee's Bend, a community that still struggles with great poverty. As these two totally different cultures come together for a magical day in April, Hilltop students witness poverty, hunger, and continuing struggle in an unfair and still segregated society, but also learn respect for the community of Gee's Bend's lives and history.
The students often join local residents in worship on a Sunday morning at the “Ye Shall Know the Truth Baptist Church” with Rev. Pettway. After, they picnic together by a bend of the Alabama River, where there is often much singing and a little quilting. Here students share the speeches and poems they have written in the voice of a civil rights leader.
Middle School student Pete Paasche, summing up what his upcoming trip to Alabama means to him, says, “Only at Hilltop do you get one of the experiences of a lifetime going to the South and meeting with civil rights leaders and participants, as well as meeting with quilters in a community that could not be more different than ours here in Brattleboro. For these quilters in Gee's Bend, we have made a quilt with all our gratitude. Although we may never match their skill, it is our way of saying thank you for everything they have done for us.”