Underground Quilt Codes Debunked!

Our member, Dr. Joe Wagner, has sent us the following information debunking the Coded Quilts of the Underground Railroads.

He has attended numerous major quilt shows with his wife, Dolores, and he can attest to the fact that quilting is a one BILLION dollar industry in the US.

Promoting their book(mention below) proved a lucrative source of income for the family of the elderly woman who was the source of an oral history of Underground Railroad Quilt Codes.

The premise of the "Quilt Code" is that various geometric patterns commonly found in American patchwork quilts were used to convey messages in connection with the Underground Railroad. But even among Code proponents, the patterns’ meanings, how the quilts were used, and who used them is a matter of debate: as of mid-2005 at least 15 contradictory versions of the Code were circulating. Some proponents claim the Code as part of their family oral history, but none can point to an ancestor who used it to escape to the North or even participated in the Underground Railroad.

Firsthand accounts of fugitive slaves and Underground Railroad participants detail many ways of conveying messages but never mention using quilts, and the details of the Code are incompatible with documented evidence of the Underground Railroad, slave living conditions, quiltmaking, and African culture. For example, the Code includes quilt patterns known to have originated in the 1930s, and while Code proponents say certain patterns are derived from African symbols, the messages the Code assigns to them conflict with the meanings the symbols have in Africa.

Along with many other myths involving quilts and subcultures (such as the Amish), the Code materialized in the 1980s during the post-Bicentennial revival of folk art, the popularization of women’s history studies, and Western notions of African culture comparable to early Hollywood depictions of Native Americans. The earliest mention of a "quilt code" is a brief statement in a 1987 feminist video:  quilts were hung outside Underground Railroad safe houses. (No source is given for the assertion and it is conspicuously absent from the companion book.) In 1993 a white Massachusetts woman elaborated on the Code idea in Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt, a children’s fiction book; its heroine makes a quilt containing a topographical map she uses to escape from slavery.

Not long after Sweet Clara was published, Ozella Williams, a retired California school administrator, used her own version of a "quilt code" to sell quilts in a Charleston, South Carolina tourist mall. One of her customers was Jacqueline Tobin, a white instructor in "women’s words," who unsuccessfully pressed Williams for details. When Williams refused to return Tobin’s phone calls, Tobin visited Williams unannounced and "coaxed" the elderly woman to reveal the Code to her.  The resulting book, Hidden In Plain View, was published after Williams's death, and was promoted by Oprah Winfrey and quilt shop owners, who produced Code quilt kits for the multibillion-dollar quilters market, and by antique dealers who used the Code as a marketing tool. Williams’s family members developed a cottage industry lecturing on the Code and selling related merchandise. Although no historian has ever supported the Code, by 2001 elementary and secondary schools were teaching it as historical fact. But after scholars pointed out numerous discrepancies between the Code and documented Underground Railroad history, earlier supporters of the Code began distancing themselves from its claims. Tobin herself has since complained that "people have tried to push the book in directions that it was not meant for."