Trivia 10-1-15 True or False

[Trivia Master]

The Underground Railroad used various quilt patterns and colors for southern refugees to guide their routes and indicate safe houses.

credit: @chellers

 

[Reb]

Underground Railroad used various quilt patterns and colors for southern refugees to guide their routes and indicate safe houses.

True

 

[ErnieMac]

False.

 

[MajGenl.Meade]

Well, this one's a matter of opinion because there is absolutely nothing other than urban legend commencing in 1987 to support it. Absent any hard evidence, I shall say "N0, it is not true"

On the other hand, the quilty must go free!

http://ugrrquilt.hartcottagequilts.com/

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.

Even that dumb Wiki, he say:

The slave quilt code is the idea that African American slaves used quilts to communicate information about how to escape to freedom. The idea was introduced and popularized throughout the 1990s. Most quilt scholars and historians consider the "code" to be completely lacking any basis in fact.... Those who have accepted the theories advanced as history, rather than the speculative quality that Dobard himself indicates is the case, have been eager to share this information via talks. The theory gained publicity when it appeared in newspapers, on a segment of The Oprah Winfrey Show featuring Dobard. The quilt code has resulted in children in school "memorizing" the "code" and making quilt blocks and quilts in either paper or cloth to honor the period of history when it was legal for southern plantation owners to own human beings and force them to work at their bidding.

Ah well, if it's on Oprah we know it's highly questionable. Thank goodness for the NY Times, the antidote to Oprah:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/opinion/02bordewich.html?_r=0

So it's not surprising that the intriguing (if only recently invented) tale of escape maps encoded in antebellum quilts — enshrined in a metastasizing library of children's books and teachers' lesson plans and perhaps even in a Central Park memorial to Frederick Douglass — should also seize the popular imagination.

But faked history serves no one, especially when it buries important truths that have been hidden far too long. The "freedom quilt" myth is just the newest acquisition in a congeries of bogus, often bizarre, legends attached to the Underground Railroad. Despite a lack of documentation, tales of actual tunnels through which fugitives supposedly fled persist in communities from the Canadian border to the Mason-Dixon Line

 

[kholland]

True

 

[nextcity]

True

Threads of Freedom: The Underground Railroad Story in Quilts, Oberlin, Ohio

http://www.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/threads_of_freedom/threads2.html

 

[GELongstreet]

True (though disputed)?

 

[Copperhead-mi]

True

 

[MRB1863]

My answer to this question must be a false.

Due to the nature of the clandestine operation of transporting contraband, IMHO the "Quilt theory" is folklore. Information regarding "Stations" along a route was passed by word of mouth. Some "Conductors" also physically guided the routes in the cover of darkness.

Additionally, the visible code of a quilt design may have been quickly decoded and information backfiring on the participants who supplied a road to freedom, had it been used. The penalties were not worth the enormous risk of having evidence leading to prosecution.

Wiki says:
Since the 1980s, claims have arisen that quilt designs were used to signal and direct slaves to escape routes and assistance. According to advocates of the quilt theory, ten quilt patterns were used to direct slaves to take particular actions. The quilts were placed one at a time on a fence as a means of nonverbal communication to alert escaping slaves. The code had a dual meaning: first to signal slaves to prepare to escape, and second to give clues and indicate directions on the journey.[30]

The quilt design theory is disputed. The first published work documenting an oral history source was in 1999, and the first publication of this theory is believed to be a 1980 children's book.[31] Quilt historians and scholars of pre-Civil-War America have disputed this legend.[citation needed] There is no contemporary evidence of any sort of quilt code, and quilt historians such as Pat Cummings and Barbara Brackman have raised serious questions about the idea. In addition, Underground Railroad historian Giles Wright has published a pamphlet debunking the quilt code.

 

[FarawayFriend]

Great question, that is why I love playing Trivia!! How fascinating!
It is TRUE.

"People who worked and traveled on the Railroad used secret

codes to learn the routes from one safe place to the next.

R e s e a rchers recently learned that an Underground Railroad Quilt

Code existed to guide fugitives to freedom. Because it was illegal

in slave-holding states to teach slaves to read, slaves could not

communicate with each other in writing. But, because slaves of all

b a c k g rounds shared an oral history of storytelling coupled with a
knowledge of textile production and African art—an art form

which embodies African symbolic systems and designs—t h e y

discovered they we re able to communicate complex messages in

the stitches, patterns, designs, colors and fabrics of the

American quilt. To memorize the code, researchers believe

f u g i t i ves used a sampler quilt, with blocks arranged in order of

the code. The patterns told slaves how to get ready to escape,

what to do on the trip, and where to go."

http://page.reallygoodstuff.com/pdfs/154227.pdf

 

[adisciu9]

True

 

[Brenal]

Depends on your source, some say true others say nonsense,
I'll go with True.

 

[Northern Light]

False. I learned this after I had spent my hard earned dollars on a book about this topic. Grrrrrrrrrrrr!

 

[Package4]

False, there is no historical/contemporary evidence that there was a code in quilts of the period to guide "runaways" Most of this came from the 1930's.

 

[rhettbutler1865]

The Underground Railroad used various quilt patterns and colors for southern refugees to guide their routes and indicate safe houses.

credit: @chellers

True.

 

[Stony]

But it is nonsense and a perfect example of what those of us who are attempting to do serious underground railroad research are up against."- Giles Wright. False
source-http://historiccamdencounty.com/ccnews11.shtml

 

[Dave G]

True ...
pretty sure i saw this mentioned somewheres

 

[BrrrBRRRR]

False

 

[tdftdf]

True

 

[R. Alex Raines]

False.