From ancestral symbols, to quilted stories, to upcycled and authentically bold contemporary style, our journey as Southern Rural Black Women is woven into everything we create.
— Southern Journeys Collective Website
Southern journeys collective is a worker-owned craft cooperative that provides income and an outlet for self-expression for Black women in the Black Belt of Alabama and Georgia and the Mississippi Delta. It seeks to celebrate and sustain West African and rural African American culture, spirit, and art through the creation of textiles.
Southern Journeys was founded with support from the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative, which conducted listening sessions among approximately 1,000 women throughout Georgia and Alabama Black Belt and Mississippi Delta counties in 2004. The women expressed a desire to own their own businesses and find work that would allow them to use their sewing and quilting skills while evolving the cultural and artistic traditions that represent an important part of their heritage.
Piece sewing, couture, and quilting are integral to the cultures and livelihoods of the African American South. The contribution of African American women to American art, fashion, and industry is undervalued. Southern Journeys seeks to recognize the meaning and value of these contributions by creating a collective platform that company members and sewers will benefit from directly.
Southern Journeys fulfills its promises of fair wages and meaningful work through its organizational structure.
For many of the sewers at Southern Journeys, the art of sewing is deeply collective, cultural, and personal. It reminds one woman we interviewed of her childhood, when her grandmother allowed her to dig through a trunk of fabric and create whatever she wanted. For another, sewing was not just a hobby, it was a necessity when she and her family were evicted from a sharecropper farm. Her mother sewed all of her clothes based on images in department store catalogs. Another member described sewing as a means of economic livelihood; she worked in apparel factories for years before they shut down or the labor was outsourced overseas. Many Southern Journeys sewers have been and still are part of community quilting bees where they quilt and sew collectively.
The collective’s techniques of piece-sewing, quilting, and weaving have roots in West African and Southern traditions. Members help to preserve these cultures and their art practices as they create their own pieces. They designed their products to incorporate and showcase traditional patterns, which they refer to by names like Jacob’s Ladder, Wheel of Freedom, Middle Passage, Blues and Jazz Remix, and African Garden.
The connections to West African culture were also made tangible through Southern Journeys’ relationship with a women’s collective in Ghana, from which it bought handdyed fabric, and the company’s ongoing commitment to purchase African textiles directly or from Black-owned businesses. Upcycled feed sacks and burlap, as well as hand-dyed fabrics, are all materials that give a unique quality to Southern Journeys’ products. The group is committed to sustainability; many pieces are made from reused denim, recycled fabrics, and vintage clothing. While many of the worker-owners had prior sewing experience at the start of the cooperative, the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative facilitated technical training for Southern Journeys members so they could create cohesive styles and collections.
Philanthropic organizations like the Kellogg Foundation and Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation were instrumental in funding the technical assistance that helped Southern Journeys get started. A myriad of other groups and individuals contributed to the collective to develop in its early stages, and partnerships with retailers and cultural festivals across the United States allowed Southern Journeys’ crafts to achieve widespread recognition and reach.
Southern Journeys fulfills its promises of fair wages and meaningful work for its members through its organizational structure. It is a limited-liability company that functions as a worker-owned cooperative, drawing members from across three states. It is part of a long legacy of African American cooperative networks that provide necessary resources, economic opportunities, and community assets for marginalized communities. The cooperative also sees its work as a mode of community-building, generating shared prosperity and cultural value.
Southern Journeys honors achievements and events of the past while making space for creativity through crafting. The products are more than socially responsible consumer goods—they are an innovative form of self-expression, keeping cherished traditions alive.
