In the early 1960s, Black women civil rights workers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) swapped their dresses for denim in emulation of the sharecroppers they worked among. This, writes scholar Tanisha C. Ford, was originally a âresponse to the realities of activismââbut denim quickly became the SNCC uniform, a âcultural and political tool deployed to create community and to represent SNCCâs vision for a new American democracy.â
âYoung black women activists abandoned their ârespectableâ clothes and processed hairstyles in order to adopt jeans, denim skirts, bib-and-brace overalls, and ânaturalâ hair,â writes Ford. These young women used this newfound âuniform consciously to transgress a black middle-class worldview that marginalized certain types of women and particular displays of blackness and black culture.â
The politics of clothing at first decreed that dressing for civil rights work meant donning oneâs âSunday best.â As Ford writes, âMovement leaders and many of the the students heralded the ârespectableâ body as the most politically effective for a young activist to possess because this body was a direct affront to Jim Crowâera depictions of black womanhood.â
So, in the first sit-ins to desegregate southern lunch counters, Black women (and men) dressed wellâbefore being smeared with food and assaulted by enraged segregationists.
But for voter registration and education work in the rural South, cardigans, dresses, and âmodestly heeled pumps,â as prescribed by college dress codes, were highly impractical. Such clothing wasnât safe, either, since it marked the women as interlopers in the eyes of law enforcement and groups like the Ku Klux Klan (who might very well be the same people). âSexualized arrest tacticsâ by officers, including rape, were a constant threat.
SNCC soon saw its members thinking of themselves as âsoldiers in the army,â fighting for freedom. Their uniform of choice became denim, the attire of the Black wage laborers and sharecroppers they worked with.
âThe longer SNCC women worked among southern farm families, the more articulate and fervent the womenâs questioning of ârespectabilityâ became. And as this dialogue evolved, sharecropper attire emerged as the perfect style to make bold assertions about class.â
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