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When she was arrested 45 years ago, Angela Davis was called a dangerous terrorist by Richard Nixon. Splashy photos accompanying stories about the fugitive on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list in Life and Newsweek helped the U.S. government cement an association between the images of natural Afro-coiffed women with criminality.

Many on social media voiced those familiar associations after Beyoncé's performance of her new single Formation at the Super Bowl, and the clothes she and her gathering of dancers wore had as much to do with it as the song's assertive lyrics. The halftime spectacle was many things, but most of all, a lug-soled boot kick to Bell Hooks, who in 2014 similarly called the singer a terrorist (and anti-feminist). She's neither, of course, but in her way she's just as radical.

For the show Beyoncé wore a custom black leather DSquared2 jacket, the sleeves trimmed with brass bullets, and a shiny golden bandolier over a leotard and fishnets, equal parts Sally Bowles, Michael Jackson and militant shorthand.

Behind the singer, a dance corps sported afros, berets and were dressed in black leather hotpants, invoking the cultural iconography of the Black Panther Party's paramilitary uniform – potent agitprop at a time when civil unrest is justifiably high, but especially in an election year when the Party's 50th anniversary happens to be shortly before the November presidential election.

The costumes and theatrics positioned Beyoncé as a renegade, and she is one – but not for the obvious reasons.

Historian Tanisha Ford dissects the ebb and flow of many of the era's style choices in Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style and the Global Politics of Soul, a rare intersection of fashion studies and civil rights that digs into dress as a political strategy.

The hair actually came first, several years prior to Davis or the Panthers. Soul sisters, as Ford calls civil rights activists and singers Abbey Lincoln, Odetta and South Africa's Miriam Makeba, were the precursors to Davis and the female members of the Party. All three refused to conform and opted to wear short, natural hair. Harry Belafonte protégée Makeba was initially glam, as he attempted to package her exoticism into an "elegant supper-club chanteuse for the elite" in the style of Diahann Carroll. Ford tells the story of how after she signed with RCA in 1960, Makeba was sent to celebrity stylist Rose Morgan's Harlem salon for press-and-curl styling but balked, and insisted it go back to her "short and wooly" texture, asserting agency over her identity. Cultural producers like RCA and Blue Note record companies "codified this visual grammar of soul to construct an aesthetic, political and sonic representation of 'modern blackness.'" The Party took that and popularized it, particularly to its youthful membership and later generations.

For example, in HBO's new series Vinyl, set in 1973 to mine that year's particular confluence of musical cultures, the young record executive assistant Cece (Susan Heyward) wears her natural hair in an afro. Note: She is not a radical political activist. At this time, the image of Davis (who had by then been acquitted) first popularized via "Free Angela Davis" buttons and posters would have adorned dorm rooms for several years, her image no longer that of an outlaw but of an assertive black female role model.

Likewise, the eye-catching, stylized Panther garb itself arose as a hybrid of radicals like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara and the general urban black cool of neighbourhood "hep cats" in their leather trenchcoats, Ford says. It evolved soon after the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense formed in 1966. "We were a phenomenon," past Panther Ericka Huggins recalls in Stanley Nelson's new documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution. (PBS airs the acclaimed doc this week.) "The way we walked, we talked, we dressed. We had swagger."

"Them stars," another member Ronald Freeman adds of the Party's peripheral celebrity supporters like Donald Sutherland and Jane Fonda, "They ate that shit up."

Beyoncé's new video and halftime performance may be among the starrier strands of today's Black Lives Matter movement and ongoing conversation of what it is to be black in America, but they are, and all while simultaneously exploring the visual history of that very conversation. As much as the singer accomplishes with her lyrics, it's these potent visuals that linger. Even in a song that mentions police brutality and afros, Red Lobster and hot sauce, the style signifiers are such specific, lesser-known cues that I wondered if Beyoncé and her team had perhaps used Ford's book as a companion (it was published shortly before the video was filmed in December).

In Formation, Beyoncé wears two different frothy white lace corsets and dresses that recall antebellum cotillions and southern parlour teas, the genteel trappings of systems of colonialism and slavery. Then in the subsequent parking lot sequence, Beyoncé and her retinue dance in faded denim separates. In the 1960s, young women activists of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee eschewed so-called "respectable" dresses and instead donned cotton denim – casual skirts and unisex workers' overalls – in part, Ford says, for practicality on the front lines of activism but also as a deliberate visual link to the sharecroppers they were helping to organize in the South. That break with the traditional, expected "Sunday best" attire of activism was divisive even before the Black Panther's more radical urban style.

And the video's glimpse inside a wig-lined boutique is a throw to the contentious subject of black hair, of chemical straightening processes versus natural and the never-ending debate about wigs. The reason the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement famously boycotted retailer Wigs Parisian in 1963, for example, is less that the white-owned hairpiece company set up shop in Harlem but that wigs were a way white America economically exploited black women's insecurities, "through its promotion of European beauty standards, which black women were not born with but could purchase in the form of wigs and skin bleaching creams. In other words, by destroying the black woman's image of her own natural African beauty…[the hair industry was] complicit in the large colonial project."

Beyoncé seems to be pointing out the artifice of wigs as an extension of the cultural imperialism that fuelled negative constructions of black womanhood. Although she herself wears them. Like Ford says, it's complicated.

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