Gladys-Marie Fry: Folklorist of black America who investigated the 'night rider' phenomenon and the quilt-making of slaves

Her book on slave quilting began with a quest to learn more about her great-great-grandmother, who had been a slave in Arkansas

Professor Gladys-Marie Fry in her office at the University of Maryland in 1997. (Washington Post by Nancy Andrews)

Gladys-Marie Fry was a folklorist who wrote books and curated exhibits on slaves’ quilting in the pre-Civil War South and the role of white supremacist “night riders” in the story-telling traditions of black culture. She spent 30 years at the University of Maryland and became a professor of folklore and English, retiring in 2000. She was the author of Night Riders in Black Folk History (1975) and Stitched from the Soul: Slave Quilts from the Antebellum South (1990).

She began the research that led to the book on night riders with an inquiry into the stories passed down over generations of what life was like under slavery and in the decades that followed. “This night rider theme kept coming up,” she said in 1974. The night rider phenomenon was a terror strategy sponsored by whites to suppress and control nocturnal mobility by slaves before and after emancipation. Tactics included vigilante violence, fostering a belief and fear of supernatural evil spirits, and warnings that being out at night meant exposure to the risk of being kidnapped and murdered by “night doctors”, who sought corpses to sell for medical experiments.

Her book on slave quilting began with a quest to learn more about her great-great-grandmother, who had been a slave in Arkansas. But the scope of the undertaking grew to encompass a national search for the likes of woven coverlets, counterpanes, rag rugs and crocheted artifacts, all produced by slave women and men.

Fry stressed the essence of family legend and cultural mythology in the search for historical truth, said Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, an anthropologist and a former student of Fry’s. “She taught me to appreciate the power of one person’s story.”

BART BARNES

Gladys-Marie Fry, historian: born Washington 6 April 1931; married Jim Knox (marriage dissolved); died Silver Spring, Maryland 7 November 2015.

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