The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, has an historic past as the site of the 1965 Bloody Sunday march for voting rights. What’s little known, though, is for years before that, after it opened in 1940, the town’s teenagers saw it as just another scenic background for prom pics and photo shoots on sunny Sundays. My mother, Josephine, around 16 at that time, was one of those who with her friends posed after church at the bridge.
Among our family’s treasured possessions is a fuzzy black-and-white 8-by-10 photo, taken, mounted, and signed by her own cousin Frank, just 20 days younger than she, as the budding photographer. Josephine is wearing a dark suit dress with white zigzag piping. Totally accessorized, she has on white gloves, is holding a flat envelope purse, and is wearing a turban that lends a sophistication beyond her young age. There are additional photos of that day with two other teenagers styling and smiling in a decades-old photo album.
Looking at the photos now, Josephine at 97 dismisses notions that she and her lifelong friend Dorothy were elaborately dressed. The fellas with them, Frank and another neighbor, also had on their Sunday best. “That’s how we dressed for church every Sunday,” she explains. “I don’t know why we took pictures that day, but we definitely didn’t know that the bridge would become so famous!”
Josephine, like her contemporaries Jacqueline Kennedy and Coretta Scott King, dressed in the formal, traditional style of her era. Mrs. King had grown up just a few miles away from Selma, in Marion, Alabama. On the day of the march from Selma to Montgomery, dressed in a coral-colored tweed skirt suit, courageously linking arms with her husband in the midst of an assassination threat, Mrs. King stood out in her fashion fit for the front line.
By that time, Josephine had migrated to the Pacific Northwest, where she became one of Seattle Public Schools’ first Black teachers and met attorney Charles M. Stokes, Seattle’s first African American elected to the state legislature. My father often participated in local demonstrations for social justice. In 1961, he provided legal advice to our Baptist church when our pastor invited King, his former Morehouse classmate, to speak, but the White Presbyterian church reneged on its agreement to host King at its larger venue. Fortunately, another auditorium was found. King’s son Martin III recently came to the city to commemorate his father’s visit.
My mother says that she was not a protest marcher but supported the movement by appointing herself as a designated driver, dropping him and others at the site of the beginning of the march and picking them up afterward.
Most folks were well dressed for the protests, signifying their intention of nonviolence. Another reason was because the minister would typically announce the march during the service after delivering a moving sermon in the style of liberation theology. There is a famous photo that appeared in the Seattle Times of a march that took place in 1968 on the Sunday after the assassination of Dr. King. Many who knew my late father say they can pick him out in the crowd, because he was known for the mink bow ties he often wore when dressed “sharp.”
In segregated Selma in the 1940s, Josephine held an after-school job at a dress shop that served both White and Black women customers. Josephine enjoyed working there, serving the African-American clientele, as well as her camaraderie with a White salesgirl her age, who helped the White customers.
One day after Jo returned from an errand to the post office, the manager greeted her with, “Catherine was looking for you. Do you know who I’m talking about?”
“Yes,” Jo said. “I know Catherine.”
“Don’t you mean Miss M—? She would be Miss M— to you,” the woman said bluntly.
“Well, for as long as we’ve been working together, she’s called me Josephine, and I’ve called her Catherine. It hasn’t been a problem for her.”
The manager did not discuss it further, and Josephine says that the woman didn’t say it in a mean-spirited way. “That’s just the way things were in the South. You were not considered equal.”
However, Josephine went home and talked it over with her parents who told her that she did not have to return. “I didn’t want to work where the woman was prejudiced. I had just been filling in for my sister who had gone off to college anyway,” she says.
Several days later, when Josephine was home alone, a policeman showed up and searched the closets of the home. He didn’t have a search warrant and wouldn’t tell her why he was there. “I was sure the woman had sent him,” she says. “I didn’t have any clothes from there. My aunt who was a caterer to Hollywood stars sent us clothes from Los Angeles that were better than those sold there.”
Unfortunately, Josephine never crossed paths again with her friend Catherine.
Josephine was soon on her way to school in Atlanta. At Clark College (now part of Clark Atlanta University), she was among an entire student body of sharp dressers. In 1943 when my mother entered college, the world was at war and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the president of the United States. From 1935 to 1944, Mary McLeod Bethune was President Roosevelt’s director of the Division of Negro Affairs and developed close ties with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. After word spread that Bethune once stood in defiance of the Ku Klux Klan when they tried to intimidate her from preparing Blacks in Florida to vote by teaching citizens to read well enough to pass the literacy test, and led a procession to register to vote, she became in demand nationwide as a public speaker. My mother remembers that it was a major event when Mrs. Bethune appeared for a speaking event at Clark.
“My roommate was assigned to be her escort,” Josephine recalls. “Mrs. Bethune’s speech was intended to inspire us to accomplish the same kinds of things she had done. Her theme was that she was getting older, and we were needed to ‘fill her shoes.’ My roommate didn’t think Mrs. Bethune’s black, lace-up oxford shoes—worn for the comfort of a woman in her 70s—were as trendy as the high-heeled pumps we students wore. So when Mrs. Bethune asked in her speech, ‘Who will step in the shoes of Mary McLeod Bethune?’ her escort turned to us and whispered, ‘Who would want to?’ And we all giggled.”
Sophomoric footwear critiques aside, the students did admire Mrs. Bethune’s founding of institutions, such as a Florida school that would become Bethune-Cookman College and organizations such as the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). Josephine and her classmates followed Mrs. Bethune’s example and joined that organization, whose mission she has remained active in and supportive of ever since. After college, Josephine followed her mother, Flossie, who had moved from Selma to Seattle. There, Jo was one of the charter members of the Seattle chapter of the NCNW and remains a lifetime member. At their last gala pre-COVID, the chapter celebrated 50 years and honored her service. She wore a close-fitting black velvet, pearl-embellished hat that she said was “as old as the chapter.”
In a later era, majoring in home economics may have led her to be able to pursue her dream to be a fashion designer. But Josephine enjoyed being an educator—and over her 30 years before retirement was known by students and parents as one of the best dressed. She often designed her own clothes and still works with a seamstress to have custom outfits made, such as the formal fuchsia ruffled gown that was a hit at her granddaughter’s 2009 wedding. In the 1950s, she wrote a lifestyle column, “Jo’s Notes,” for a local Black newspaper. In what we would now call her “profile” photo, she is wearing a navy blue suit and matching hat with an oversized rim that encircles her face.
Serving in community organizations, she was able to make fashion part of the fundraising efforts. In the 1960s on behalf of her Delta Sigma Theta sorority chapter, she was instrumental in getting the popular Ebony Fashion Fair to add Seattle on its national tour. The proceeds were used to benefit the United Negro College Fund. By this time, I was a child going backstage at the fashion show, mesmerized by the runway models, including the Black and beautiful Judy Pace, who was my favorite and often featured in Ebony and Jet magazines.
For galas of her community organizations and my father’s political events when he served in the Washington legislature, a saleswoman at the Frederick & Nelson department store called to tell her a Givenchy gown had been shipped to the store that they felt would be perfect for her. As she was being fitted, she was told that only one gown in each size had been made and that Rose Kennedy, the mother of John F. Kennedy, had worn one of them to the opening of the Kennedy Center in 1971. Josephine has kept that gown as pristine as a piece of art. With nonpartisanship when it came to First Lady fashion, Josephine admired the style of both Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan.
Being born and raised in multicultural Seattle, I always considered the personal customer service extended to her in mutual respect to be sweet revenge for the retail racism she experienced in her adolescence. With my mother having a decades-long subscription to fashion magazines, and with my dad known for “staying GQ down,” I was indoctrinated to believe that the content of our character was first judged by the clothes we wore. Whether at a march or the mall, one needed to be dressed to get respect. Following the family fashion lifestyle, I chose to pursue a career at Glamour and Essence magazines after attending Howard University.
Thirty years later, my own daughter, Anique, also caught the fashion legacy bug. After college and traveling the world as a dancer, she embarked on a career in style working at sportswear brand Under Armour, visual merchandising for a major athletic brand, and launching her own online vintage clothing store, Jo & Ivy, inspired by and named after her fashionable grandmothers.
Recently, there has been a groundswell of national support to change the name of the Edmund Pettus Bridge to honor the late congressman John Lewis. His tan raincoat and tab collar white shirt with black slim tie worn while crossing the bridge for voting rights has become iconic. Josephine keeps up with the social change there in phone calls with Dorothy, who still lives in their hometown. The 1963 march was for voting rights; now Terri Sewell, the daughter of their mutual friend and activist, the late Nancy Sewell, is a representative for that congressional district. In August 2021, Representative Sewell (D-AL) introduced the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which passed in the House, while standing at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Just a few weeks after Selma’s Pettus bridge opened, Seattle observed the first crossing of the Lake Washington Floating Bridge. My mother can see that scenic pontoon structure with similar arches from her home, where she has resumed dressing to the nines for church when COVID restrictions allow. And in a nod to aging gracefully like Mrs. Bethune, she has ditched her kitten heels for more sensible ballet flats. Among family photos in the childhood room of her son André, now a civil rights attorney, is the picture of her as a stylish teen prominently displayed for seven decades, reminding the family of our American roots.
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Fashioning Freedom
Source: Filipino Journal Articles
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