The story of the sovereign seamstresses
How Martha Jane Blackburn's legacy of needlecraft helped liberate and empower African-American women
By Anita Martin
Martha Jane Hunley Blackburn arrived on the Ohio University campus in 1912 with her nose in a book and her thoughts ablaze with classic prose. The university's first female African-American graduate claimed her primary passion, English and literature, as her major and home economics as her minor. After graduation, her priorities switched. Though literature inspired her senses, her trade was ruled by her more domestic sensibility: Blackburn taught home economics from graduation to retirement, making skilled seamstresses out of many young women.
The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the sewing needle can beat poverty and even chains. Now, 93 years after Blackburn's historic enrollment in Ohio University, fragments of her heritage emerge to prove it. Among those, a lost letter written by Blackburn was unearthed just before the second campus visit of an honored guest: Jeanne Blackburn Burch, her only daughter.
Portrait of the past
On June 18, 2005, Burch, 85, entered Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium in a wheelchair surrounded by family and friends, including her granddaughter, Mariska Williams. This was the second Athens visit for both Burch and Williams. Burch came in 1979, when her mother received the Alumni Medal of Merit, one of the Ohio University Alumni Association's highest honors. When, in 1999, Memorial Auditorium was renamed for the university's first African-American graduates, Blackburn had passed away and Burch was unable to attend, prompting Williams to represent her great-grandmother.
Then, in late May 2005, Director of Education Abroad Connie Perdreau got a call from Cornelius Jones, an administrator at West Virginia State University and Blackburn's grandson-in-law.
''Mrs. Burch was advancing in age and had never seen the portrait of her mother or the new Patricia Ackerman Lobby of Memorial Auditorium with the African American Alumni Heritage Wall,'' Perdreau says.
Office director by vocation, Perdreau claims local history as her avocation. She worked with Lyn Wetteroth Gumowski, who studied with Blackburn's granddaughter at West Virginia State University and served as associate director to what is now Ohio University's Office of Institutional Equity, to research Blackburn's history. On that June day, she met with Blackburn's descendents to honor Blackburn's life and compare notes, including a letter found just a month before.
''I was relocating my grandmother to Maryland and amongst things that could have been thrown away was the document,'' Williams says. ''My cousin, who was helping me pack, said, 'You need to see this!' ''
The letter reads with the efficient clarity of an educator, though some names and dates are missing.
''[My] grandmother Jane McGilvery,'' Blackburn wrote, ''was born in slavery, the child of her master and an Indian woman. Her master kept her in the main house and not in the slave quarters. When she was old enough, she was taught how to sew. … She soon developed into an excellent seamstress.''
Not only did sewing buy Blackburn's grandmother her comfort in the main house, but it also facilitated her freedom. When McGilvery turned 21, her master granted her freedom papers and sent her north. She followed the Underground Railroad to Wilmington, Ohio, where, according to Blackburn, ''she immediately found work sewing in the better families.''
Fabled fabrics
According to popular folklore, the sewing needle may have helped women like McGilvery navigate north. As the story goes, escaped and freed slaves memorized a poem that explained hidden directions within different quilt patterns, which were hung as signposts along the Underground Railroad.
''There are no surviving examples, no proof,'' cautions quilter and historian Carolyn Mazloomi, founder and president of the Women of Color Quilting Network. Despite misgivings about the accuracy of the quilt code legend, Mazloomi avows the social and historical value of quilting, a traditional standard of African-American needlework.
''Quilts can say just about anything,'' Mazloomi says. ''They are a glimpse into history and were spiritual food for the maker -- something they could claim as purely their own, especially at a time when black women have possession of nothing but their personal belongings and what’s inside of them.''
Blackburn's college degree afforded her a level of self-possession rare among African-American women of the day. Yet, when she graduated summa cum laude, she had no idea how her goal of teaching literature would evade her or how central her grandmother McGilvery's sewing legacy would be to her life -- and to the lives of her students.
Close-knit class
Even before she graduated, Blackburn was offered three home economics positions, including one as head of the home economics department at Wilberforce University near Dayton, Ohio. She accepted this latter job and worked for two years before marrying Charles Blackburn, son of Ohio University Trustee John R. Blackburn.
After their daughter, Jeanne, turned 3, Blackburn ''got the old urge to teach again,'' according to a letter she wrote to Gumowski. She again applied for English positions and again received an offer in home economics, this time at Washington High School in London, W.Va.
''I decided then that God must have something in mind for me by sending me all these different places to teach home economics,'' Blackburn wrote.
Blackburn remained at Washington High for many years, teaching young girls who often had to be bussed in from small surrounding towns.
''These girls had practically no training in the ways things should be done,'' Blackburn wrote. But, before long, her students ''were not only making beautiful clothes for themselves but for their brothers and sisters.''
It didn't stop there. Katherine Atwater, one of Blackburn's students, wrote in a letter to Gubowski, ''I do know that Mrs. Blackburn was the best home economics teacher ever. There are 24 or 30 of her former students who have made seamstresses, dressmakers and tailors. No other high school ever turned out so many who could sew so well.''
Atwater, 92, of Boomer, W.Va., was one of Blackburn's students who made a living with needle and thread. When asked about her work, Atwater laughs.
''Baby, I've done it all,'' she says. ''I’ve done over 100 weddings. At one time, I made majorette and cheerleader outfits for seven high schools. There isn't anyone within a 75-mile radius of where I live that I haven’t sewn something for.''
But sewing isn't everything. ''Sure, I can name at least 10 black girls just in my neighborhood who were able to make a living thanks to Mrs. Blackburn, but she taught more than sewing. She taught morality; she taught everything.''
Atwater even lived with the Blackburns for three summers to help take care of Jeanne and to learn, as Blackburn would have put it, ''the little nice things of life.'' They stayed in touch until Blackburn's death. Atwater still sends quilts to Blackburn’s family.
Threads of honor
In preparation for Blackburn's alumni award ceremony in 1979, Gumowski asked the esteemed alumna to write about her life after graduation.
''I know that it won't seem like a very exciting life,'' she wrote, ''but as I look back on it and receive these letters from girls whom I have taught, and who have made a success out of their lives, I feel that I have fulfilled what my destiny was to be.''
Hers was a destiny that Ohio University still honors and celebrates.
''You have to put Blackburn with the work of (Carter G.) Woodson in West Virginia, who started Black History Month, with the work of (W.E.B.) DuBois,'' says Vibert Cambridge, chair of the Department of African American Studies at Ohio University, who attended the June 18 visit. ''She was one of these black people involved in creating their own education, charting their own destiny. This undermines the idea that black people have no agency.''
During that return visit in June 2005, three generations of Blackburn descendents gathered in Templeton-Blackburn Alumni Memorial Auditorium to piece together impressions of history like a patchwork quilt. Meanwhile, the humble excellence of one woman's life carries on, steady as a patterned stitch, ceaseless as a seam.
''We are standing on the shoulders of your heritage,'' Cambridge told Burch as she stood beneath her mother's portrait at Ohio University, ''and that is our heritage.''
Anita Martin, BSJ '05, is a writer for University Communications and Marketing.
Related link
Descendants of former Ohio University President Robert G. Wilson, who helped to emancipate and educate the university’s first African-American graduate, John Newton Templeton, recently visited as well. Read more here.
