Podcast summary
Stitched Monuments: The Sew Their Names Project
Quilts preserve enslaved names against erasure
The project treats quilts as living monuments by stitching forgotten enslaved people’s names onto fabric. It counters historical erasure and forces communities to confront how records reduced humans to property.
Naming shifts moral status from property
Archival “colored/white” church records and census anonymity show how bureaucracy dehumanized people. Putting names back into quilt material makes them explicitly human, changing what remembrance can ethically claim.
Truth-telling requires crossing social discomfort
Participants describe initial resistance, fear of being used, and concerns about “rehashing” trauma. The work succeeds by stepping outside comfort—inviting artists, historians, and quilters into shared narrative control despite harm risk.
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