In 2018, I was 22 years into a busy career as a United States Magistrate Judge in the Middle District of Alabama. I had arrived in Montgomery from Yale Law School in 1985 to clerk for renowned civil rights judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and stayed to become a judge myself 11 years later in the same courthouse.
I was vaguely aware that my family had its own troubled racial past in Alabama—I knew that a number of my mother’s ancestors were slaveholders there before the Civil War—but I had little more information. That all changed when a chance encounter in court compelled me to confront the news that an antebellum church in rural Lowndes County once pastored by my great-great-grandfather, a prominent Baptist minister, had contained a slave gallery (a balcony in which enslaved persons were compelled to worship in segregated seating). I also learned that a Black church nearby had recently acquired that building.
I recount the story of what happened next in the article linked below, which was published in May 2025 in Duke University Press’s Radical History Review. I will not preempt that story here, but suffice it to say that my somewhat fraught first encounter with the pastor of the church that now owns the antebellum site turned into a years-long relationship, and resulted in an extraordinary partnership between two descendant communities to reconcile and reopen dialogue.
Along the way, I stumbled on hundreds of forgotten names of enslaved church members in dusty Baptist archives, and the two communities came together to produce “Sew Their Names” quilts to memorialize these individuals. The quilts—now four in number—have been the subject of museum exhibits, programs, podcasts, and seminars, as well as a documentary film that has been screened at film festivals across the country. This work has had its challenges—mostly prompted, I believe, by my own naiveté and the blindness of privilege. But I value the results of those efforts just as much as anything I achieved on the bench.
While I do not draw a straight line in the article between my experiences at Oxford and in rural Lowndes County, I do credit the Rhodes Scholarship with helping me find space for openness, curiosity, and commitment to public service beyond the narrow bounds of a judicial career, and for reinforcing the enduring value of hard work and persistence. And my awareness of the troubled origins of the wealth that made the scholarships possible has also been an important factor motivating me to engage with difficult history closer to home.
Please click on the link below to read Judge Walker’s full article, made available here courtesy of the Radical History Review.
Susan Walker, “The Sew Their Names Quilt Project, Lowndes County, Alabama,” in Radical History Review no. 152, pp. 155-177. Copyright 2025, MARHO: The Radical Historians' Organization, Inc. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the publisher. www.dukeupress.edu