For a few weeks last summer, Philadelphia was preoccupied with a protest of a very peculiar kind--one waged in the screen-prints of cotton T-shirts.
It was July, and television cameras had just captured Philadelphia police officers kicking and punching Thomas Jones, a carjacking suspect, after a chase and shootout. The tape of white and black cops roughing up a black suspect was broadcast across the country, sparking protests over police brutality.
The incident was the wrong kind of publicity at the wrong time. The Republican National Convention was coming later that month to the City of Brotherly Love. The police were charged with keeping order during the sure-to-be controversial confab. And so it didn't help that a few days before the event, an enterprising Philadelphia narcotics officer, Kenyatta Lee, began selling limited-edition T-shirts at police headquarters, at $10 a pop. On the front of the T-shirt were emblazoned the words, "RNC Welcoming Committee" and the badge of the Philadelphia Police Department. But it was what Lee put on the back that created an uproar: "Welcome, America," in chunky blue letters, and underneath a black-and-white photograph of police officers bringing down Jones.
After seeing the tape of the Jones incident on the nightly news, church and civic leaders in the African American community called upon the city's police commissioner to charge the offending officers with assault. When that effort failed, the activists, led by the NAACP, took their fight elsewhere. They publicly identified four of the "most zealous" officers involved in the beating in one of the city's African American newspapers. They threatened to name more names if officials did not do so first. And they started selling their own T-shirts. Twenty dollars each, intended to be worn at a rally, the shirts said in red letters, "Stop Police Brutality."
It might have seemed an unusual role for underwear to be playing. But for both sides of the protest line, T-shirts made sense. Inexpensive and portable, capable of relaying concise messages that stray eyes--and TV cameras--couldn't resist, T-shirts became weapons in a public relations war. With inimitable quiet brashness, they could speak for the street cops who felt besieged and unappreciated; in a spectacle of human bodies tattooed with red letters, they could express the frustration of African American families who felt victimized by the law. The T-shirts said things about the people who wore them, said things to the people who would never wear them--and acted in no way like the simple pieces of woven cotton they were supposed to be.
But that has been the case since the fifties, when Marlon Brando, in
his bicep-caressing white T-shirt, made it more than an undergarment and
workingman's uniform. Then, T-shirts were a sign of the rebellion. And
with the invention of plastisol, a durable, stretchable ink that could
be screen-printed onto cotton, the rebellion spoke: in slogan upon slogan,
broadcasting humor and idealism and quick commerce. Today, T-shirts are
the most visible of underwear, the most varied of clothing forms, and
perhaps the most democratic symbol of our time--worn by people across
all social lines, used for reasons as myriad and motley as the bodies
that wear them. If they are undeniably ordinary, they nevertheless have
a power only imaginable in our age of fast-paced media and mutable identity.
For that reason in Philadelphia last summer, cotton was king.
Wear your heart on your short-sleeve