Maia Surdam
The Story Behind the Square...
My Quilt Square honors the creativity and dedication of the teachers who taught at this school, mostly African American women, some of whom we know about and many whom we don't. I learned about one such teacher, Ruby Fortune, in some oral history interviews conducted with alumni of the Mars Hill Anderson Rosenwald School in the 1980s. Miss Fortune taught in the Long Ridge community for two years in the 1920s before the new Rosenwald School was built. She was an innovative teacher who liked to lead her students in hands-on activities. She showed them how to form and fire pottery using clay that they dug themselves right outside the school building. She taught them how to make brooms and shuck dolls and how to take old newspapers and turn them into belts and frames.
One year, John D. Rockefeller came to visit the school. In honor of his visit, Miss Fortune and her class prepared a special art exhibition for him and the local community. They made pottery, brooms, rugs, dolls, and even a cake and put everything on display. One alumni, a woman named Shirley Sewell, remembered that people from Mars Hill College came to the exhibition and even bought some of the pottery. We don't have a picture of Ruby Fortune, just these stories that some of her students shared many years later. In this quilt square, the figure in the middle represents Ruby Fortune, but I designed her to look like Jenny Pickens, the teaching artist who led our page students on this quilting project in July 2021. Miss Pickens represents the new generation of dedicated, creative teachers who are educating young people within the school building.
Along the edges of the quilt square, I wrote the names of some of the teachers who once taught here. There's also an X printed that stands for all of the other teachers' names that have been forgotten with time.We might not know their names, but their legacy lives on. Listen to the names of some of the teachers who once educated the African-American youth in Madison County. Elise Randolph, Lizzie Coleman, Grace Owens, Mary Wilson, Sally Ledbetter Davidson, Francis Owens, Charity Hazard, Sally A. Green, Miss Roseberry, Mrs. Phillips, Mrs. Davis, and Mrs. Conley.