Boykin, Alabama, also known as GEE'S Bend, Alabama

Note, many enslaved Black people from NC were taken to Gee's Bend when the slaver who owned them moved from NC to Gee's Bend. -End Note.

Note: We pieced this post together by using several sources about Gee's Bend, Alabama and the Gee's Bend Black Population-End Note.
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Photo collage description,
Left to Right:
*Jennie Pettway and another girl with quilter Jorena Pettway, 1937. Photo by Arthur Rothstein.

*Girl looking out window at Gee’s Bend, Alabama. Taken in 1937 -printed later-From The Arthur Rothstein Collection- In Nasher Museum collection.

*Annie Pettway Bendolph carrying water, 1937. Photo by Arthur Rothstein.
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Boykin, Alabama also known as Gee's Bend, is an African American majority community and census-designated place in a large bend of the Alabama River in Wilcox County, Alabama. As of the 2010 census, its population was 275.

The Boykin Post Office was established in the community in 1949 and remains active, servicing the 36723 ZIP code.

Gee's Bend was named for Joseph Gee, an early large land owner from Halifax County, North Carolina who settled here in 1816. Gee brought 18 African American slaves with him and established a cotton plantation within the bend.

HISTORY
Boykin is a block of land enclosed on three sides by the Alabama River, within a horseshoe shaped turn of the river named Gee's Bend. It is within the Black Belt of Alabama. The plantation started by Joseph Gee passed to his nephews Sterling and Charles Gee upon his death, along with 47 slaves

The brothers then sold it to their relative Mark H. Pettway in 1845 to settle a $29,000 debt. About a year later, the Pettway family moved from North Carolina to Gee's Bend, bringing about one hundred slaves with them. When slavery was abolished many of them continued working for the Pettways as sharecroppers. Many of the black tenants Arthur Rothstein photographed were named Pettway.

The white Pettway family owned the property until 1895, when it was sold to Adrian Sebastian Van de Graaff. Van de Graaff, a lawyer from Tuscaloosa, then operated it as an absentee landlord.

The Resettlement Administration reports of the 1930s emphasized the isolation of the community, describing the unreliable ferry that approached from the east and the muddy road that entered from the west. The community had received public assistance from the Red Cross in 1932 and federal and state aid in 1933 and 1934.

Beginning in 1935, the Resettlement Administration made agricultural loans and offered farm and home management advice. In 1937, the average rural rehabilitation loan to Gee's Bend families was $353.41, and the agency reports speak of possible cooperative undertakings; a building campaign for houses, barns, a schoolhouse, and a sawmill. Residents were also encouraged to replace oxen with more efficient mules.

The agency's programs at Gee's Bend continued after Rothstein's visit. During 1937, the agency purchased the old Pettway plantation, and two adjacent farms, totaling over 10,000 acres, for $122,000.

The agency then sub-divided the land and rented it to 92 families. The following year, a nurse began working in the community, and construction began for a school, store, blacksmith shop, and cooperative cotton gin. By 1939 enough visible change had occurred for Roy Stryker to send Mary Post Wolcott to the community to photograph the signs of progress—to get the "after" pictures.

During the 1940s, many families at Gee's Bend bought their farms from the government for an average of $1,400 each. This was about $2,600 less per farm than the eighty-eight units had cost the government, a subsidy that seems to have been fairly typical for Farm Security Administration projects of this type.

Gee's Bend continued to fascinate outsiders. In 1941, New York City speech professor and folklore collector Robert Sonkin recorded music, recitations, discussion, and a Fourth of July program at Gee's Bend.

FERRY SERVICE
Gee's Bend became an important part of the mid-1960s Freedom Quilting Bee, an offshoot of the Civil Rights Movement designed to boost family income and foster community development by selling handcrafts to outsiders.

When large numbers of residents began taking the ferry to the county seat of Camden to try to register to vote, local authorities reacted by eliminating ferry service in 1962. The lack of ferry service forced the residents of the community to drive more than an hour in order to conduct business in Camden. The people of Gee's Bend would be without a ferry service for forty-four years.

In the 1990s, Congress allocated money to pay for a ferry service and operating costs, but the project floundered when the Alabama Department of Transportation hired Hubert Bonner, a boat builder who had never built a ferry. Bonner's ferry, completed in 2004, got stuck on a sandbar and did not pass Coast Guard inspections.

Alabama then hired Hornblower Marine Services, to rebuild the ferry that Bonner completed, fixing the problems to allow the ferry to pass the Coast Guard inspections. Hornblower completed retrofitting the ferry in May, 2006. The ferry service began anew on September 18, 2006, after dredging of the route was completed.

By 2020, the ferry carries up to 15 cars and 132 passengers, and its diesel propulsion system has been replaced by electric motors and 270 kWh batteries being recharged at the docks.
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GEE'S BEND QUILTERS
"The quilts of Gee's Bend are quilts created by a group of women and their ancestors who live or have lived in the isolated African-American hamlet of Gee's Bend, Alabama along the Alabama River.

The quilts of Gee's Bend are among the most important African-American visual and cultural contributions to the history of art within the United States. Arlonzia Pettway, Annie Mae Young and Mary Lee Bendolph are among some of the most notable quilters from Gee's Bend.

Many of the residents in the community can trace their ancestry back to enslaved people from the Pettway Plantation.
Arlonzia Pettway can recall her grandmother's stories of her ancestors, specifically of Dinah Miller, who was brought to the United States by slave ship in 1859."
Source Link at bottom of post.
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From "Souls Grown Deep"

The residents of Gee’s Bend, Alabama are direct descendants of the enslaved people who worked the cotton plantation established in 1816 by Joseph Gee. After the Civil War, their ancestors remained on the plantation working as sharecroppers.

In the 1930s the price of cotton fell and the community faced ruin. As part of its Depression-era intervention, the Federal Government purchased ten thousand acres of the former plantation and provided loans enabling residents to acquire and farm the land formerly worked by their ancestors.

Unlike the residents of other tenant com­munities, who could be forced by economic circumstances to move—or who were sometimes evicted in retaliation for their efforts to achieve civil rights—the people of the Bend could retain their land and homes. Cultural tradi­tions like quiltmaking were nourished by these continuities.

Most Gee's Bend’s residents accordingly did not participate in The Great Migration, during which over six million African Americans from the rural South journeyed to the cities of the North, Midwest, and West from about 1916 to 1970. By remaining in Alabama, most were not afforded the opportunity to become participants in the burgeoning American middle class, the wellspring of opportunity for many of the artists today recognized in the global art market.

In the 1960s, spurred on by Martin Luther King, Jr’s visit, community members became active in the Civil Rights Movement, ferrying to the county seat at Camden to register to vote. Authorities reacted by eliminating ferry service altogether, effectively isolating the community and cutting it off from basic services. During this period, local women came together to found the Freedom Quilting Bee, a workers cooperative that provided much-needed economic opportunity and political empowerment.

Throughout this time, and up until the present, the settlement's unique patchwork quilting tradition that began in the 19th century has endured. Hailed by the New York Times as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced,” Gee’s Bend quilts constitute a crucial chapter in the history of American art and today are in the permanent collections of over 20 leading art museums.
Source link at bottom of post.
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There has been controversy about how a White man "discovered" these Black women quilters, "The Gee's Bend Quilters", how he saw the value of their quilts and began to cheat them out of what they deserved. How in the beginning he bought their quilts for five to 10 dollars knowing they were worth more.

He dressed his plan up as a White savior always does. There are others in the art world who defended him, but Black people know all too well how White saviors dress up their manipulation so that we are seen as being in the wrong, being ungrateful for being given crumbs for our labor, our crafts, our inventions and our intellectual property,

The Black quilters are somewhat split in how they see their treatment by the Arnetts.
Some are pleased with the attention and opportunities his "discovering" them have provided. Others are also pleased, but still lay claim to the fact that he cheated them..

There are several articles about what happened and several first person accounts of what happened.
We know we can't add all of the articles to this post, so we'll post the links to several articles at the end of this post.
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ALABAMA QUILT MAKERS FILE SUIT AGAINST PATRON
By Matthew Bigg / Reuters
September 18, 20077:06 PM-Updated 14 Years Ago

GEE’S BEND, Alabama (Reuters) - Their story is a heartwarming tale gone sour. In an obscure village in rural Alabama a group of women toiled for decades to make a living.

In their spare time they made brightly colored quilts for warmth, for fun and as an outlet for their creative energy, following a tradition passed down from mother to daughter since the days of slavery in Alabama.

“Quilts were a consolation to me. I didn’t have so much worry when I was making quilts. I just kept my mind on the quilts,” said Nettie Young, who started to make quilts at age 6 using off-cuts from old pieces of material and is now in her 90s.

Their lives were anonymous until, a decade ago, the few dozen women were discovered by international art collector Bill Arnett, who recognized the artistic value of the quilts and began to purchase them.

He saw them as more than useful household items. Their abstract designs mirrored the improvisational quality of jazz and deserved to be considered alongside the established canon of U.S. 20th century artists.

“I became convinced that there was an ‘invisible civilization’ in the black South that had produced the visual-arts equivalent of the great musical idioms: the blues, jazz, gospel and seminal rock ‘n’ roll,” said Arnett, who is based in Atlanta.

For the women, fame followed. The quilts were displayed to an enraptured public at art galleries in New York and Houston.

“People said: ‘There are these people against all odds who created things of timeless beauty,’” said Peter Marzio, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Quilting is part of the African American folk art tradition and there are many exponents aside from the women of Gee’s Bend. One prominent quilter, Nora Ezell, died in September.

In 2006, the U.S. government issued a series of stamps commemorating the quilts of Gee’s Bend.

Prices for the quilts soared into the thousands of dollars and, as money started to flow into Gee’s Bend, it looked as though the women were finally getting some of the financial compensation that they had lacked.

LAWSUIT
But if the story of women in old age getting the reward they deserved appeared too good to be true, perhaps it was.

Two of the women this year filed lawsuits in Alabama’s courts against Arnett, members of his family and one of his companies, Tinwood Ventures.

Annie Mae Young and Loretta Pettway claimed they had been cheated by the Arnetts out of proceeds from the sale of quilts and inadequately compensated for their intellectual property.

Pettway said she received no more than $19,000 from the sale of quilts and a little more for the stamps, even though her designs appeared on household goods such as duvet covers.

In a third suit, Lucinda Franklin sued for damages after lending two quilts to Matt Arnett, Bill’s son. She said he refused requests to return them, only doing so when the lawsuit was filed.

At issue was whether the Arnetts exploited the women using their knowledge of the art market and the commercial potential of the quilts.

“There was deliberate exploitation,” said Stephen Wallace, an attorney for the three women. “It stems from a sort of arrogance (that says): ‘How dare you question me? I brought these women to the forefront.’”

Arnett defended his role and said he had always acted with the consent of the Gee’s Bend quilters and in their interests.

“I risked nearly everything I have to advance the artistic cause of an impoverished ... black community ... against the tide of history and public opinion, and in the face of ridicule,” said Arnett in an e-mail.

“I was directly responsible for bringing their previously unheralded work to the attention ... of the wider world, both the art world and the general public, and I was committed to helping them in whatever ways I could,” he said.

COMMUNITY
One hot afternoon in the tiny town half a dozen women sat at the Gee’s Bend Collective making a quilt. The building acts as a center for the women and a point of sale for the work.

More than 130 children arrived in buses as part of a holiday club day-trip to learn about the quilts and listen to the women sing gospel songs, for which they have also become famous.

The court case has put a strain on the community but several women said relations with the Arnetts, who visit the village often, remained strong.

They said the lawsuit mattered little compared to the values that had strengthened them through years of hardship and underpinned the quilts they had made.

“Have a dream about what you want to be. Want your education. Put God first ... Stay out of trouble. Do what’s right,” Young told the children.
-END ARTICLE-
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BELOW is a portion of a NYT article. The link is at the end of this excerpt-

“We’re not trying to set up a socialized state,” Mr. Arnett said, “but we were doing something in between.” Ms. Pettway and Ms. Young acknowledge receiving multiple payments from the Arnetts ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, but say they have no accounting of the total or any list of the quilts bought or borrowed. They also say they received dividends from the collective even though they never placed quilts there to sell.

But Ms. Young and Ms. Pettway, whose quilts have been featured on the covers of two of the three books the Arnetts have produced, contend that they have not seen the full benefits of their success.

“I was just hearing them say, the quilts were worth more than that,” Ms. Young said. “The quilts were worth more than they was giving us.”

A third lawsuit, brought by Lucinda Pettway, a resident of Mobile, Ala., whose forebears lived in Gee’s Bend, accused the Arnetts of refusing to return two of the community’s oldest quilts, dating to slavery times. The Arnetts have since returned the quilts, but say an appraisal showed that they were not nearly that old and were worth less than $500.

To Loretta Pettway, a woman for whom indoor plumbing is a relatively recent luxury, big-city museums, glossy hardcover books and color postage stamps can look like a lot of money, even though they rarely produce profits.

“You’re making money,” she insisted, gesturing at an oversize book containing color reproductions of her quilts. “Because you ain’t going to be doing this if you’re not getting paid.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/us/29quilt.html

OTHER SOURCES THAT WE USED FOR THIS POST ARE BELOW.

Source: https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-quiltmakers

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boykin,_Alabama

Source: https://www.reuters.com/.../alabama-quilt-makers-file...

Source: https://www.seattletimes.com/.../gees-bend-quilts.../

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quilts_of_Gee%27s_Bend