Word: plaines
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When Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard explored in their book Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (Random House) a family legend that said messages encoded in quilts helped slaves escape to freedom on the Underground Railroad, they had no idea that their hypothesis would inspire rancor from scholars who declared it false. They also couldn't have predicted how their story, published less than 10 years ago, would capture the popular imagination - being treated as fact on The Oprah Winfrey Show, in museum exhibits, in children's textbooks...
...Hidden in Plain View is the story of one woman's family," explains Tobin, a journalist and teacher, who said she first heard about the codes when she bought a quilt from a woman named Ozella McDaniel Williams at a Charleston, S.C., market in 1994. Williams told Tobin that for generations women in her family had been taught an oral history that stated that quilt patterns - like log cabins, monkey wrenches and wagon wheels - also served as directions that helped slaves plan their escapes. Since she lacked historical data to back up Williams' claim, Tobin enlisted her friend Raymond Dobard...
...exhibit, which presents the thesis of a quilt code. There are also smaller lectures taking place at local libraries, churches and quilt guilds all over the country. The story has also ended up in lesson plans and textbooks (TIME For Kids even published an article about Hidden in Plain View in a middle school art book published by McGraw Hill in 2005). Recently the issue got national attention when plans in New York City to include a quilt element in a Central Park Memorial statue of Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave who became a famous abolitionist, raised...
...Roland Freeman, a civil rights activist and photographer who has been documenting African American quilters for nearly 30 years, has another take on why the story is so popular. "Hidden in Plain View is how we got over those white folks. Right under the nose of white folk we're sending signs and symbols and they didn't know it. While I think it's so ridiculous, African Americans are starved for those kind of stories in our culture and we're willing to accept it because it's what we want to hear...
...volunteer for community service in the City Year Young Heroes program was inspiring and informative [March 26]. But let's not forget the thousands of kids who crisscross the nation every summer to attend church work camps. These teens work in cities, towns and villages, building, painting and just plain helping people. The youngsters pay their own way, take their own tools and buy all the supplies. Theresa Lorbiecki, MILWAUKEE...