Heather Andrea Williams, assistant professor of history, stitched this quilt over eight months while conducting research for Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (see “They Dared to Learn”). She searched through images that depicted African American life in the nineteenth century, had more than a dozen of them imprinted on cloth, and stitched those cloths with fabric from Africa. Williams taught herself how to quilt more than twenty years ago and has made more than a hundred. But this is the first quilt in which her research made its way into her craft. Her goal was to “juxtapose the oppression of slavery with resistance,” she says. That’s why she includes images of shackles alongside the lyrics of spirituals that “speak of a better day.”
