What the Civil Rights Movement Has to Do With Denim

The history of blue jeans has been whitewashed
...
...
While Elvis Presley and the cast of Rebel Without a Cause helped spark
a new appreciation for bootcuts among the Youthquake culture, most
people considered them too closely linked with the working man to wear
them. For example, in 1969 nearly 200 students got suspended from
their high school for wearing dark blue pants because they too closely resembled blue jeans. They were mostly something you wore while
cleaning out the garage, not something you put on for cocktails.

But the revolutionaries on the front pages of newspapers helped denim
become a staple in everyday people's wardrobes. "It took Martin Luther
King's march on Washington to make them popular," wrote Caroline A.
Jones, author of Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar
American Artist. "It was here that civil rights activists were
photographed wearing the poor sharecropper's blue denim overalls to
dramatize how little had been accomplished since Reconstruction."

While at first activists snapped on their overalls out of practicality
-- they were tired of mending tears from attack dogs and high-pressure
hoses, and jeans could withstand the abuse -- they also put them on to
bring back a not-too-distant past. They used to be referred to as
'Negro clothes' -- slave owners bought denim for their enslaved
workers, partly because the material was sturdy, and partly because it
helped contrast them against the linen suits and lace parasols of
plantation families -- and their inclusion in the civil rights
movement suggested that pointed societal divide. For much of the black community, the activists' symbolism was obvious. Separate then;
separate now.

https://www.racked.com/2017/10/30/16496866/denim-civil-rights-movement-blue-jeans-history

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