Detail of Charlie Lucas quilt from “Sew Their Names” exhibit 2025.
Abraham Rowe Photography
Lowndes.
Bloody Lowndes.
Lowndes County, Alabama.
About midway between Selma and Montgomery in Alabama’s Black Belt.
The Selma to Montgomery March went through Lowndes. Stokely Carmichael rose to national fame in Lowndes County. The Black Party Panther Party for Self Defense logo traces its history directly back to the Lowndes County Freedom Organization.
Lowndes County takes center stage in “Sew Their Names: Quilting, Creativity, and Activism,” an exhibition on view at The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, 80 miles to the east, through July 2, 2026. The presentation features quilts and other art objects inviting visitors to consider how art with ties to Lowndes County has for decades served as a vehicle for memory and transformation.
Hopewell Baptist Church
In 2008, the abandoned Hopewell Baptist Church building in Lowndes was gifted to the Snow Hill Christian Church by the last remaining members of the Mt. Willing Baptist Church which succeeded Hopewell. Hopewell was an antebellum-era church built by enslaved people. It was a church where the institution of slavery had been defended and promoted and where racial segregation was enforced among the parishioners. An entrance in the back for Black worshipers to observe from a balcony above the main sanctuary.
This was common among period Baptist churches in the South.
In the 1840s, southern members of the national Baptist church organization split from their northern colleagues to uphold slavery from their pulpits.
Hopewell Baptist Church preached a gospel of righteous slave holders and racial superiority. The Church’s founding and longtime pastor was Reverend David Lee: slaveholder. He held 25 people in bondage at one point on a plantation nearby.
Fast forward to 2018 when by extreme coincidence, Susan Russ Walker, then a U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Middle District of Alabama in Montgomery, happened across Hopewell Baptist Church’s historical registry listing online after a completely unrelated David Lee argued a case in her courtroom. She knew the name from family history. It got her to thinking and Googling and remembering Hopewell–where she’d visited once in the 80s while it was unoccupied. It led her to Reverend Dale Braxton.
Braxton was pastor at the Snow Hill church that had been gifted the Hopewell building.
Walker was shocked to learn the depth of her ancestor’s slaveholding reading about Hopewell’s past. She suspected it, but that wasn’t the sort of detail passed on by her family.
Not knowing exactly what to do with this information, but knowing she had to do something, Walker reached out to Braxton. The two began working together to restore the Hopewell church and tell its story.
Walker earned a fellowship to study the Hopewell Baptist Church’s history and the Southern Baptist church’s support of slavery. Her research began at Samford University, a private Christian school in suburban Birmingham housing the archives of the Alabama Baptist Church.
Digging through yellowed and fragile 160-plus year old records, Walker came across documentation of dozens of enslaved people who had been members of Alabama Baptist Association churches. The ABA was the dominant Baptist organization in Alabama’s Black Belt, a region dominated by plantation slavery.
The documents, amazingly, included names. Dozens of them. First names, at least.
Enslaved people rarely had their names recorded in America. The easier to dehumanize. Census data only listed a number, gender, race, and age.
The archives did not include information about congregants at the Hopewell Baptist Church.
Again, Walker was left not knowing exactly what to do with this discovery, but knowing she had to do something.
Sew Their Names
Detail of Wini McQueen quilt from “Sew Their Names” exhibit 2025.
Abraham Rowe Photography
A quilting circle developed at the Snow Hill Christian Church in 2005. That church is located in rural, unincorporated Mt. Willing, AL, one county west of Lowndes. The group sews their quilts for fellowship and charity in partnership with the Lowndes County Community Life Center, also led by Braxton.
Thinking about how to memorialize the names of formerly enslaved people who worshipped at area Baptist churches, Walker and Braxton thought of the sewers. This was 2021. George Floyd and Brianna Taylor had been murdered by police the year prior. A call to “Say Their Names”–and the names of countless other African American victims of police violence–rose up nationwide.
“Say Their Names.”
“Sew Their Names.”
What about asking the Mt. Willing quilters to embroider the names of the formerly enslaved Walker uncovered onto small sections of fabric and incorporate them into quilts?
Braxton took the idea to the quilters.
“We were not really sure what the judge was up to,” he said during a presentation with Walker held at The Auburn Forum for Southern Art and Culture on February 7, 2026. “We believed in her, but we wondered what was the underlying motive? What is she going to get out of this? Before we said ‘yes,’ we also thought about that white men have always done this to us. Always used the scriptures, they beat us over our heads, ‘Slaves, obey your masters,’ have always done something to try to get ahead. I said, ‘Let’s trust the judge. Let’s just try.’”
The judge proved trustworthy.
Ever since, the Sew Their Names Project has been honoring members of the Alabama Baptist Church who were enslaved and whose names are rarely recorded in other historical documents. While the Project is managed by the Mt. Willing quilters and Braxton, artists from outside the community have been invited to contribute.
“I thought about ‘sew their names.’ Do I really want to know who they are? Do I really want to dig into this thing called slavery again? But then I thought about my great-great-great-grandmother, grandma Bessie, who lived to be 105, who was a slave,” Braxton is quoted as saying on the Hopewell Project website. “She died when I was very young, but I do remember her. She always said to us that we were somebody. So why not remember them? Because they were somebody, too.”
The Quilts
Yvonne Wells with her quilt from the Sew Their Names Project in the “Sew Their Names” exhibit 2025.
Abraham Rowe Photography
Prior to the exhibition at Auburn University, The Jule supported a five-stop, statewide tour of the quilts. Members of the public were invited to join the quilters in sewing on a name from the Samford archives or sharing one of their own from a familial connection.
“I’m inspired by something that we’re seeing more and more of in art and culture, these efforts to engage people socially, politically, through works of art and through acts of making things together so that all of the participants contribute and have both emotional and historical investment in the final result and some ownership over what happens in the end,” Chris Molinski, Janet L. Nolan Director of Curatorial and Educational Affairs The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, told me in a phone interview.
Visitors to The Jule will see Sew Their Name Project quilts produced by Mercedes Braxton, Wini McQueen, and Yvonne Wells.
“It was so painful to make,” Wells (b. 1939), a native Alabamian who’s seen her quilt making achieve national prominence, said in another panel discussion at The Auburn Forum for Southern Art and Culture. “It was tough to make that quilt because it brought back all memories that I had been told about slavery and had experienced seeing people pass me going to the field to pick cotton, but I said, ‘Just let me try,’ and if I complete this quilt, I will show it to the world so that they can understand some of the things that they have read about.”
Wells’ quilt, one of the first two produced by the Project has only one name on it: boy.
“Boy” being the default name white people called Black men for centuries in America to humiliate and demean them. To reinforce racial hierarchy.
Wells’ quilt depicts a large man at the top with arms outstretched along the sides.
“I brought in the preacher, and what he did, he was wrong,” Wells explained. “He separated the Black from the white.”
David Lee perhaps.
Wells is not a Mt. Willing quilter. Neither is Charlie Lucas, who also has a quilt displayed separately at the Jule Museum. A quilt featuring faces and chains.
“The faces you see, those are the people that were screaming out to me, telling me to go ahead and do this,” Lucas (b. 1951), also a native Alabamian, said at the Forum. “Make sure my name is spoken. Make sure my name is spoken. These were people screaming and hollering. Some of them had lost the whole family through this. Some of them was down in chains.”
Like Wells, producing the quilt took a toll on Lucas.
“I had to cry over this. This took me down to crying,” he remembers. “I don’t really cry that much, but I had to cry over this because when I put the chains on and then I said, ‘Will this change something so deeply has been bounded down. Will this woman break this chain?’ Yes, she broke the chain. She broke it by loving her children. She broke it by loving her neighbor. She broke it by doing something positive for these people.”
Listening to the quilters, it becomes apparent how much more than fabric or documents or abstract “history,” these artworks represent.
“All living was a building block for me to come up to something this close and touch these people’s name. I touched their lives. I touched what they was to me. I touched what they had struggled for. I touched all of that through this (quilt),” Lucas continued. “When you look at this, it’s a time capsule that nobody knows how to put the lid on because there’s so much got to be put in.”
Artwork From Lowndes County
Jesse W. Favor, candidate for sheriff of Lowndes County, Ala., displays a pamphlet of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (Black Panther) which plans to conduct it’s nominating convention in Hayneville May 3, 1966. Favor is boycotting both the Republican Party and today’s Alabama Primary. (AP Photo)
Copyright 1966 AP. All rights reserved.
In addition to the quilts, the exhibition explores the work of American visual artists Noah Purifoy (b. 1917) and Bill Traylor (b. 1953) and the influence of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization.
The presentation includes a new Jule Museum purchase of a Purifoy collage. Purifoy, who rose to the heights of contemporary art, was born in Snow Hill. Paintings and drawings by Traylor on loan from a private collector can also be seen. Traylor and his family worked a plantation in Lowndes County during enslavement, and worked the same land after emancipation. He moved to Montgomery in his 50s, came to some local prominence making art in his 80s, and posthumously has become one of the most celebrated folk artists in American history with a past solo exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
