Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul by Tanisha C. Ford (review)

Tanisha C. Ford presents a creative and thoroughly researched piece of scholarship. She deftly moves across the African diaspora to historicize soul-style fashion popular from the late 1950s into the 1970s. Testimonies of individual women from South Africa, London’s Brixton neighborhood, and her own mother’s story of growing up black and female in Indiana form the heart of the narrative. African American soul music and the black press provide an additional layer of sources, as well as an explanation for how soul style moved around the Atlantic. Ford places black women at the center of both defining and popularizing not only soul style but also the transatlantic civil rights struggles of the mid-twentieth century.

Readers of this journal will be most interested in chapter 3 about soul style in the 1960s U.S. South. By the time readers arrive in the South, Ford has already taken them through the early roots of soul style in the Greenwich Village and Harlem neighborhoods of New York City. These two earlier chapters focus on the connections between fashion and music in defining a soul style that combined African American ideas of authentic African dress, textiles, and hairstyles that were not always accurate. Women members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) expressed a different kind of soul style that arose from working in the rural South. SNCC women adopted the clothing of the rural working class as a practical response to their inability to perform civil rights work while dealing with constant hair upkeep and care of expensive fabrics. This fashion also became a response to the respectability politics espoused by other civil rights organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and by the black press.

The book reaches the height of the soul-style movement in the fourth chapter, which is also the strongest. It is here that Ford’s mother, Amye Glover, becomes the focus of the narrative. Glover grew up attending a predominantly black high school in Indiana but then went to the predominantly white Indiana University. She was an early adopter of soul style in her teenage years, and it became an even larger part of her identity in college. Glover’s story and personal photos are combined with Ford’s analysis of popular magazines like Essence, the mass production of soul style, and an excellent breakdown of the Afro hairstyle.

Ford’s international focus allows her to place African American ideas about Africanness within a global framework, particularly in the last chapter describing soul style in anti-apartheid South Africa. Her approach to historicizing a fashion moment within a political movement is a significant contribution to a growing body of literature that recognizes the importance of everyday experiences. In the epilogue, Ford explains her own connections to soul style and the importance of doing this research to better understand herself. The moving testimonies Ford presents of the black women who lived through soul style’s heyday are proof that activist scholarship motivated by personal experience provides powerful contributions to the field of history.