By Joel Thurtell
Early in 2007, I read a New York Times article exposing a hoax involving the history of the Underground Railroad. I call it the slave quilt scam. Soon after I read the Times article, I noticed the marquee at the Plymouth (Michigan) Historical Museum actually promoting this fraud. The museum was advertising its presentation of alleged slave quilts. The museum claimed slaves in the antebellum South communicated with secret codes contained in quilts they hung on fences, and when it was time to run for freedom, the quilts would telegraph the order.
It was the same story the Times article exposed as malarkey. I told one of the local historians that according to the Times, the museum’s claim was untrue.
“We don’t think much of the New York Times around here,” she replied.
The Plymouth historians staged their slave quilt exhibit as they had done for several years.
I wrote a story about the hoax for the Detroit Free Press.
The following year, there was no slave quilt exhibit at the Plymouth museum.
Here, with permission of the Detroit Free Press, is my article about slave quilts.
Headline: HISTORIANS: SLAVE CODE’S A MYTH
Sub-Head: DEBATE SURROUNDS QUILT LORE, PART OF PLYMOUTH EXHIBIT
Byline: JOEL THURTELL
Pub-Date: 2/18/2007
If you were a slave trying to escape bondage in the pre-Civil War Deep South, what would you do?
A. Look at fences to see if someone hung up quilts with coded patterns telling you when to run, what to take, where to go.
B. Go to a big town in the South and try to blend in with free blacks.
C. Get to a port and take a boat.
If you answered A, you may have read a book that claims slave-made quilts reveal codes that were part of an oral tradition that was secret until a few years ago. Or you may have seen the slave-quilt exhibit at the Plymouth Historical Museum, on display through June 20.
According to historians, only B and C are correct.
Though the Plymouth exhibit has been up in previous years for Black History Month, my interest was piqued because there has been some recent debate about whether the quilt-code claim is bogus.
A popular book from 2000, “Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad,” says quilts revealed Underground Railroad codes.
How would the quilts work? Slaves would look at fences to see if someone hung up quilts with specially coded patterns. Falling boxes meant time to go; a monkey wrench, pack up your tools; a bear’s paw, follow tracks because bears know their way around the mountains.
The Plymouth museum doesn’t claim that the quilts on display were used by slaves. Some are pretty old, but their purpose is to help make the argument that quilts were used in the Underground Railroad.
So what’s the debate? Well, two articles in the New York Times last month quoted historians saying the quilt code is a myth.
Donna Keough, who creates the exhibits at the Plymouth museum, told me she’s aware that the code story has been criticized. Keough said: “This display, however, because there are critics, tells one familiar story told by Ozella McDaniel Williams in the book ëHidden in Plain View.’
“We are showing this version. If you choose to not believe it, that’s your prerogative. That’s why we live in America.”
But I was curious. Do these quilts at the museum help illustrate an important piece of history or perpetuate a myth?
The Times weighed in on this topic Jan. 23 with an article about plans to build a monument to abolitionist Frederick Douglass in Manhattan’s Central Park with depictions of the slave codes taken from the 1999 “Hidden” book by Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard.
In the article, Yale University historian David Blight said the quilts are “bordering on a hoax.”
The Times also published an opinion column Feb. 2 by historian Fergus M. Bordewich. He called the quilt story “faked history.”
It was time to begin my own research.
‘Hidden from View’ examined
I bought the book and read as much as I could stand. It’s what journalists call a one-source story. The one source is Williams, who tells coauthor Tobin about the secret quilt code. Oh, by the way, Williams, of Charleston, S.C., was peddling quilts with these same patterns; she managed to sell one to Tobin.
Maybe there was an economic motive on Williams’ part to move a little product by hyping this story about slaves signaling to other slaves with quilts hung on clotheslines or over fences?
Williams died several years ago, but her niece, Serena Wilson of Columbus, Ohio, explained the story to me: “In my family, we’ve handed down the secret message in quilts and songs. When I was a little girl, there was a lot of prejudice, Ku Klux Klan members, night riders and people who believed in Jim Crow.
“My grandmother said never tell anyone about the secret messages in the quilts.”
Wilson makes and sells so-called plantation quilts and does speaking engagements. Her presentation in Plymouth five years ago prompted museum officials to put together the exhibit.
The Underground Railroad
Bordewich of Barrytown, N.Y., wrote a history of the Underground Railroad, “Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America.” Records from slave times don’t mention quilt codes, he said. The Tobin book popularized the story, but he calls it “ridiculous.”
In his piece in the Times, Bordewich wrote, “The myths flourish because there has been an assumption that the Underground Railroad was so secret that you can’t know how it really worked, therefore anything is possible. The truth is that it is pretty well documented.”Bordewich added: “The racial radicalism of the underground was too subversive for Americans to accept in the decades after the Civil War when this country embraced racism and segregated institutions. The true story of the Underground Railroad was suppressed; instead, we invented myths.”
Martin Hershock of Canton, a history professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, agreed. “Any time you’re dealing with the Underground Railroad, the myths are monumental,” Hershock told me.
“Virtually any house that dates from the antebellum period is going to have a claim affixed to it that it was part of the Underground Railroad. If every house that had such a claim attached to it were actually a part of the Underground Railroad, there would have been a giant sucking sound as every single slave from Kentucky was instantaneously drawn out of the South.”
Revisionist history
“Part of it is the desire that people have to want to portray not only a nation’s history, but perhaps their own family’s history in as positive a light as possible,” Hershock said. “It has to do with our present-day shame with the institution of slavery and our desire to make it appear that there was a great deal of hostility and opposition to slavery at the time.”
The idea put forth by Williams that slaves fled from the Deep South – South Carolina, in the case of Williams’ ancestors’ purported story – just didn’t happen, Bordewich wrote.
“Very, very few – a tiny number – of fugitives actually escaped from the Deep South,” Bordewich stated. “The vast majority of fugitives came from the border states of Maryland, Virginia and Kentucky. How do I know that? The Canadian Census of 1861.”
I was troubled by the “Hidden” book, because its proofs either relied on an unsubstantiated story or were preceded by expressions like “we suspect,” “we believe,” “we felt” or “we surmise.” In other words, readers are being asked to take this yarn on faith, without historical evidence.
There’s one passage where the authors explain how a quilt with a bear paw pattern told slaves they could count on bears to lead them to freedom: “Because the bears lived in the mountains and knew their way around, their tracks served as road maps enabling the fugitives to navigate their way through the mountains.”
Come on, would a slave running for freedom waste time looking for bear tracks, let alone trusting one to show the way out of a wilderness?
The quest for answers in the quilt code controversy forces us to learn unpleasant things about our nation’s past. But that is good.
It is better to know these things. In the case of the slave quilts, the search for answers forces us to better understand the hardships of slaves.
“Any time you’re dealing with the Underground Railroad, the myths are monumental.” said Hershock.
Contact JOEL THURTELL at 248-351-3296 or thurtell@freepress.com
Caption: REGINA H. BOONE / Detroit Free Press
The Plymouth Historical Museum’s display focuses on the use of quilts as a form of covert signals to runaway slaves. Last month in the New York Times, two historians refuted the slave-quilt code. Yale University historian David Blight called it “a myth.”
Illustration: PHOTO
Edition: METRO FINAL
Section: CFP; COMMUNITY FREE PRESS
Page: 7CN
Keywords:
Disclaimer: THIS ELECTRONIC VERSION MAY DIFFER SLIGHTLY FROM THE PRINTED ARTICLE
Memo: PLYMOUTH CANTON NORTHVILLE; BLACK HISTORY MONTH
