One thing that gets overlooked in discussing “respectability politics”. The civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s? Dominated by the black church, marches dressed all formal? That aesthetic wasn’t just some attempt to prove blacks were bougie enough to deserve rights or something.

The thing about preachers and suit-and-tie types delivering speeches invoking Protestant Christianity and American ideals, arrayed against vulgar, corrupt officials, their brutish followers and police thugs, bound by ethnic solidarity and pursuing their selfish interest through brute, unadorned force?

That was exactly how northern progressives – Republicans and the “good government” Democrats who sometimes joined with them in “fusion coalitions” – understood themselves in contrast to the white ethnic machine politics that dominated big cities.

It was saying to the educated professional elites outside Dixie, “your struggle and our struggle were the same struggle all along”.

This is in contrast to the previous civil rights movement of the 1910-20s, which drew more on the then-contemporary imagery of the revolutionary masses and got absolutely walloped by the powers that be.