“It’s my belief that the meaning of life changes from day to day, second to second. I believe we’re here to learn that we’re part of a creative force. I would go so far as to call that force divine. World, our world, if we choose, can be a heaven or hell.”
This quote lines a square on the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Also on the quilt is “Drake University remembers friends and alumni, Des Moines, Iowa” in letters that span the whole of the square. The square stands next to roughly 50,000 others in San Francisco, California, honoring people who have died from HIV and AIDs. This year, Drake’s square reached its third decade in the memorial.
The quilt square originated from the work of members of Drake’s chapter of the National Residence Hall Honorary Community Service Committee. Chaired by Christy Duncan, the committee of students wanted to memorialize Drake students and alumni who had died of AIDS.
“[The committee] would like to help Drake to become part of this symbol of unity and hope,” Duncan said to The Times-Delphic when the quilt was being designed in 1995.
Drake community members were able to sign the quilt in Olmsted Center over Drake Relays week that year. Upon the quilt are signatures large and small, peace signs, hearts and a handprint.
Over the next decades, the quilt traveled the country with its group of panels, including a return to Drake in 2002, and a display in the Hoyt Sherman Place in 2023, where Lori Blachford, the former chair of magazine journalism at Drake and founder of the LGBTQ+ Alumni Association, first saw it on display.
“It was breathtaking,” Blachford said. “I mean, honestly, after all that time, to see those quilts and how well they’d been preserved, and how, just how poignant that message still was, and then to see, in giant letters, ‘Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.’”
Blachford had no idea the panel existed before seeing it on display, and immediately had questions about its creation, the signatures and how it got to where it was. She sent her questions to Alumni Relations, but admired the idea of the quilt even before knowing its full story.
“To see the students stand up and say, ‘Hey, we see this happening. We don’t want this to happen. We know we’ve lost people,’ I love that,” Blachford said. “The campus community, the university community is a great place for that, because it’s like a family… So any time we can get together and pool, whatever it is — our resources, our voice, whatever that is, there’s a lot of power in that.”
The campus community at the time was grappling with an epidemic that would go on to kill an estimated 44.1 million people, according to UNAIDS. In 1985, professors and the health services coordinator lectured frequently about AIDS, urging students to practice caution even if they didn’t think they could get infected. Despite this, misinformation and prejudice caused what TD opinion writer Mike Mitchell called “mass hysteria” in 1985.
Many people associated AIDS with the LGBTQ+ community, causing a rise in homophobia during the period.
“Individual people signing the panel with their message with their name, coming forward, wasn’t always an easy thing to do, and wasn’t always something you could do without suffering some backlash, depending on where you were in the history of this event,” Blachford said.
While it is unknown how many Drake students and alumni have died of the disease, a TD article from February 1992 said that at least nine former students had died of AIDS. In 1995, when the quilt was made, AIDS was the leading cause of death among Americans aged 25 to 44, according to AIDS.org.
The AIDS memorial quilt has 700,000 names etched onto it, honoring those who passed. Roddy Williams, senior operations manager for the memorial quilt, said Drake’s panel was artistically grouped with other squares of the quilt because of when it was submitted.
Since its original donation, the panel has traveled to seven different locations. Every time a square returns from a location, it receives a hands-on approach to preservation to ensure that the strength of the seams and other aspects are still intact. Because the panels are sometimes displayed outdoors, they can face fading issues.
“We just want to make sure as a whole that the piece is still intact, and if not, if some pieces are loose or coming off, then we’re able to put it through a cycle of repair,” Williams said. “We have a team of seamstresses that come in twice a month, and they come in for four hours on that Saturday.”
Blachford said that while the quilt panel is powerful by itself on display, it is most impactful when it is in its full context, surrounded by thousands of other quilts.
“It’s Drake’s little voice they had in this, when sometimes it felt like people weren’t listening at all. And it lasts,” Blachford said. “There it is, years and years and years later. There it is, being seen and having that kind of impact on people who had nothing to do with that start, but understand what it’s about and take it to heart even today.”
