The Importance Of Freedom Quilts

The difficulty of having freedom quilts as a research topic is because most of the evidence is known as lore. Lore is collected knowledge or beliefs held by a group about a subject, when passed from generation to generation by oral tradition (Lore 1). According to an article titled, Quilts in The Underground Railroad, in An Encyclopedia of People, Places and Operations, Freedom quilts were created by those who were against slavery known as abolitionists they acted as guides to illiterate slaves travelling on the Underground Railroad (Quilts 1).

First of all, according to Wright, in his article, Underground Railroad the term Underground Railroad started in 1830 when trains started to appear in America. The Underground Railroad was known to be a hidden network of people and places who helped escaped slaves from the south to the north, sometimes all the way to Canada. Slaves that travelled were thought to be a pack of men ranging from all ages but typically fifteen to thirty years of age (1). They travelled at night through the two main routes. The first route went straight north to Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. That route was mostly slaves from Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The second route took slaves from Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware north through New Jersey (1). Other routes included Texas who would lead their slaves south over the Mexico border and Southern Florida slaves who would travel to the Bahamas or to the Caribbean. In New Jersey, slaves entered through Delaware and Pennsylvania and would move into New York. Almost all of the major paths have been identified within New Jersey where only two counties have been recognized with ha...

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...elevant. Continuing to quote Roland Freemen, he says, " While I think it's so ridiculous, African Americans are starved for those kind of stories in our culture and we're willing to accept it because it's what we want to hear" (Stukin). Is it what they want to hear? That Freemen is telling them that their oral history is not true? That because they could not document the time and the experience that it is false and misguided? Basically the answer is what Glenda Hawkins said, "Nothing is written down to prove that it existed, but there is nothing written down to prove that it didn't" (Satnan). I feel as though historians are keen on factual evidence when they need to look around at the facts and piece together that not everything is going to be solved by a few words scribbled down on a page but what is known and accepted by the people who believe that it happened.