ABSTRACT
By the late nineteenth century, upwardly mobile African Americans sought to “uplift the race” by seeking political, social, and economic equality. A well-dressed Black man or woman at the turn of the twentieth century could represent a threat to some whites as an assertion of Black expectation and aspiration. Thus dress became at times a political statement that signified to whites and Blacks the attitudes and expectations of the wearer. As Danielle McGuire has written in her history of women, sex, and the Civil Rights movement, “Respectability had been a staple of African-American politics since Reconstruction. . . .” 1 Fashion choices have been used by other groups at other times and places to achieve the same goals, but in the context of twentieth-century Black freedom struggles, clothing was an important outward means by which to assert demands for equal treatment. This essay examines media representations of African American women active in the early Civil Rights movement, primarily through their work with the NAACP, to document the degree to which an image of “respectability” was deployed as an important tool in achieving the goals of the Civil Rights movement.
