![]() I was initially wary, as were the other two Black women in our conference. “He wanted to know if we would endorse his quilt project. “I didn’t know from Adam, and I immediately didn’t trust him,” admitted Ward during a Zoom interview from her home. She is a member of the New Hampshire UCC’s Racial Justice Mission Group, which had to give approval to the quilt proposal. This ancestral knowledge at first made Ward, a retired cortical-vision scientist, less than sanguine about Koyama’s motives for his project. Harriet Ward, who as a Black woman knows the history of racist atrocities. The agony in Floyd’s last utterances is far too familiar to Sacred Ally quilter Dr. “Those words are the distillation of four hundred years of oppression,” said Koyama. They resonate too with the cries of Black men and women extending back through centuries of American history. They evoke the “last seven words” of Jesus, his expressions of pain, abandonment, and entreaty from the cross as recorded in the Gospels. Stitched in four-inch letters across each surface, Floyd’s words have a searing effect. The quilts, each four feet wide and between three and six feet long, exploit all the techniques of fabric art, including vibrant colors, diverse textures, expressive needlework, and designs inspired by traditional New England forms, contemporary art, and African aesthetics. “I knew there was a demographic of people in churches in New Hampshire who wanted to be allies but didn’t know how,” he explains in the film. It was second nature for Koyama to use a seemingly benign craft art as a hammer against racist violence. ![]() “That was definitely where my early reflex toward activism came from,” he said in a recent interview. Koyama’s mother participated with the church in protesting the policies of Ronald Reagan, and he remembers meeting Salvadoran refugees given illegal sanctuary in one of the cathedral towers. Theology superstars like James Cone and Cornell West were neighbors, and at Riverside, Koyama listened to the sermons of Senior Minister, former Yale chaplain, and prototypical radical churchman William Sloane Coffin ’49 B.A., ’56 M.Div. His family lived across the street from the storied edifice while his father, Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama, taught next door at Union Theological Seminary. When he preached on May 25 under the Gothic roof of the Riverside Church, Koyama was returning to the place where he worshipped as a teenager in the 1980s. From May 26 through June 10, the quilts are back on exhibit at PE 109. ![]() Three days later, on the anniversary of the killing, the quilts were installed for one day only in Manhattan’s Riverside Church, where Koyama was guest preacher at the evening service. On May 22, Positive Exposure 109, an East Harlem gallery and performance space, unveiled the project and hosted the film’s world premiere. The experience of seeing the ten quilts together for the first time, Koyama recalls in the documentary, “was one of those moments where the hair stands up on the back of your neck.”Īs the second anniversary of Floyd’s death approached, the UCC minister was experiencing more of the same frisson as the quilts left New Hampshire for New York City. The scene is captured in Stitch, Breathe, Speak: The George Floyd Quilts, a new film that documents the project. The quilts were later displayed in a nearby reception hall, the first time anyone had seen them in one place. Now, masked and socially distanced, they’d brought their creations to the open-air cathedral for a service of blessing led by Koyama. Nine churches responded to his “Sacred Ally Quilt Project” and over that summer worked in pandemic isolation to create 10 quilts. Koyama, pastor of the United Church of Jaffrey, invited congregations statewide to design and stitch quilts based on George Floyd’s last words. offered UCC churches across New Hampshire an answer. How to respond to such brutality? Ten days after the video of Floyd’s death went viral, Rev. Handcuffed and pinned to the pavement, Floyd pleaded for eight minutes and forty-six seconds as his life ebbed away under a policeman’s knee. On a late September Sunday two years ago, some 45 members of the United Church of Christ gathered at the outdoor sanctuary of the Cathedral of the Pines in southern New Hampshire to remember the words of a dying man.įour months earlier, on May 25, 2020, America and the world had watched in horror and outrage the public murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
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