Fashioning the Protest

Rosa Parks’s simultaneous work as a seamstress and as secretary for the Montgomery branch of the NAACP reveals the deep ties between Black style and activism. In fact, she was carrying a dress she was in the process of sewing when she refused to give up her seat to a white man in 1956. This dress of golden yellow and silver flower print, with a wrapped bodice, puffed wrist, and matching belt, is now housed in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Dress and style is significant throughout the civil rights movement, from the prim, tailored clothing of the 1950s to the African-inspired print of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s to the militant black turtlenecks and denim of the Black Panther Party of the 1970s. The aesthetics of the civil rights movement spread the message of Black pride and resistance to the masses even more so than pamphlets and speeches. Mainstream narratives focus on the 1960s & 70s sartorial trends as a symbol of youth culture, but for Black Americans, the shifting fashions were literally to save their lives. 

Four young women sit around Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. in a classroom, their hair neatly pressed and their blouses and calf-length skirts equally so, as they furiously write notes. They are called the “Bennett Belles,” students at the other women’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) — Bennett College — and paragons of mid twentieth century Black womanhood. The story of the Greensboro Four, a group of North Carolina A&T State University students whose sit-ins at the Woolworth lunch counter sparked a movement, is much better known. The involvement of Bennett’s students is less well-known, both because of the male-centric lens of history and the “culture of dissemblance” [6] that kept young Black women self-effacing and quiet about their accomplishments. Nevertheless, the story of youth protest and resistance in the 1950s and 1960s is one of the tension between respectability and radicalism, which was most apparent in dress. 

There are copious photographs of young Black men and women staging sit-ins at lunch counters and resisting police brutality — all in the crisp shirts, blouses, skirts, and trousers of the period. Bennett Belles themselves were taught to set the table, how to move and speak, to be the perfect hostess and housewife; the Bennett way of life “recognized the pressures of racial judgement which they would confront as soon as graduation was over.” [7] The emphasis on respectability was supposed to provide for young Black men and women a veneer of protection as they entered all white spaces with the intention of disrupting social norms. HBCUs like Bennett College, North Carolina A&T State University, Howard University, Morehouse, and others prided themselves on educating and creating upwardly mobile Black citizens whose external appearance was no different from predominantly white institutions. Ironically, during the civil rights movement, HBCU student activists found themselves rebelling against these restrictive campus rules as they realized that no amount of ties and prim blouses and polished shoes would diminish racism. 

By the 1960s, Black students began to shed their relaxed hair and respectable clothes for denim and natural hair. Tanisha D. Ford recounts this particular shift in fashion for women members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul. Young Black women not only found themselves vulnerable to sexual violence in these prim and proper clothes, but they were impracticle garments when facing the possibility of being arrested, hosed down, assaulted, and imprisoned. [8] Furthermore, these college educated young Black women found themselves marching shoulder to shoulder with working class and rural Black Americans, whose homespun clothes and denim suddenly became a point of solidarity. As these SNCC activists shed their fancy clothes and shoes in exchange for overalls and cotton shirts, they also refused to straighten their hair into the accepted hairstyles for a middle class Black woman. [9] Singer and actress Abbey Lincoln caused a firestorm in 1961 when the cover of her album, Straight Ahead, featured her natural hair. A few years later, young Black women — and young Black men — arrived at activist meetings and protests with their curls, coils, and kinks rising as high in the sky as their fists.

The Black Power movement of the 1970s had its roots in the previous two decades, but the cultural and social turmoil after the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 created a clean break with the respectability roots of the early phase of the civil rights movement. Black young women and men melded their burgeoning natural, grassroots style with African influences to declare that Black was indeed beautiful–that finding identity in a “pure” African heritage would inspire greater racial uplift and pride than adhering to white/mainstream American norms. The Black Panther Party’s mission spread outside of Oakland, California not solely because of their militancy but because of the iconic images that circulated of their leaders adorned in proud afros and uniform of black clothing. Angela Davis’s afro’d and denim-clad image circulated even further, thus solidifying the tightening link between Black pride, militant activism, and style. [10]

By the end of the 1970s, the changing political and social winds — and the perception of widespread Black middle class achievement and assimilation after the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — saw afros shrink and African inspired clothing fade away. However, contrary to popular belief, the relationship between fashion and Black activism did not disappear. The booming beats and scratches of hip-hop records that emerged from the inner cities of the Bronx in the late 1970s heralded a new phase. Working class young Black men and women rejected their marginalization in 1980s society by adorning themselves in flamboyant clothing that signaled their hood, their block, their street from thrift stores, street hustlers, and “hot” (aka stolen) trunk sales. [11] Renowned designer Dapper Dan, whose knock off designer goods and luxury refashionings, defined the age. His eponymous memoir is a tribute to Black culture’s continuous belief in making a way out of no way and the historical roots in aligning Black uplift and protest with fashion. Furthermore, the relationship between protest and fashion is both a negotiation and a rejection of mainstream norms, which has been a major influence on the development of Black adornment and style over the course of the twentieth century.