One thing that gets overlooked in discussing \u201crespectability politics\u201d. The civil rights movement of the 1950s-60s? Dominated by the black church, marches dressed all formal? That aesthetic wasn\u2019t 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 \u2013 Republicans and the \u201cgood government\u201d Democrats who sometimes joined with them in \u201cfusion coalitions\u201d \u2013 understood themselves in contrast to the white ethnic machine politics that dominated big cities.
It was saying to the educated professional elites outside Dixie, \u201cyour struggle and our struggle were the same struggle all along\u201d.
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.
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