By Blake Deshazo

The Selma Times-Journal

The city of Selma will show its unity later this month by coming together to create a quilt. Leaders of the local faith community have organized a sewing session for people to make quilt squares.

“This is the tangible sign of trying to bring people together and just doing something positive,” said Jamie Alvey, who helped organize the event. “It’s not about who can make the best quilt square. It’s about bringing people together in a positive way.”

The quilting session will be held Saturday, Jan. 31 from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

The Selma session is one of many that are being held in part with the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Department of Art and Art History and the Bib & Tucker Sew-Op’s project to create commemorative quilts for the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

The squares sewn in Birmingham will represent the Civil Rights Movement, while the squares in Selma will represent the community coming together.

“We wanted to do a unity quilt to symbolize unity and healing in the community,” Alvey said. “So they are letting us do things a little differently with our quilt.”

People that attend the Selma session will make squares that represent what unity means to them. People can also submit 7-inch squares for the quilt if they can’t attend on Jan. 31.

The process of making a quilt, Alvey said, is more than just sewing.

“You think about making a quilt and making these blocks,” Alvey said. “And to sew them together into something is just really symbolic of bringing the community together.”

The session will be open to anyone who wants to attend, Alvey said, and no sewing experience is needed.

“This is just a way to build relationships and to bring people together,” Alvey said.

After the session the squares will be sewn together to form one quilt. The quilt will then be carried during a unity march Sunday, March 1 at 2 p.m. called “One Selma: Going Home United in Faith.”

“This quilt will be a patchwork of Selma and a symbol of us working together and marching together,” said Juanda Maxwell, who helped organize the march. “This is about the community speaking for itself and not anyone else. It represents that we’re not all the same, but we’re all going in the same direction.”

For more information, email selmaunityquilt@gmail.com or call 553-3464.