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Hello, Stitchers.
Welcome to Stitch Please, the official podcast of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black Lives Matter.
I'm your host, Lisa Wulfort.
I'm a fourth generation sewing enthusiast with more than 20 years of sewing experience.
I am looking forward to today's conversation.
So sit back, relax, and get ready to get your stitch together.
Hey, friends.
Hey, it's Lisa from Black Women Stitch and the Stitch Please podcast.
And this is a very special episode.
because this episode is a celebration of black history through the lens of creative liberation.
Today, I want to take you back 70 years or so to a beauty contest winner named Evelyn Sanders, a woman who in 1946, sewed her way into history.
At a time when bias tried to limit her opportunity, Evelyn used fabric, thread and bold ideas to confront colorism and present her beauty on her own terms.
It was December 1946.
The hit song, Fine Brown Frame performed by Buddy Johnson and his orchestra was the soundtrack of the summer.
The jump blues style song was everywhere.
Evelyn could hear its trilling trombone and peppy piano belting from the jukeboxes in uptown New York City or in her own adjacent town in Long Island.
The black press, especially the gossip columns, had adopted the phrase to describe the next best pretty young thing.
When Buddy Johnson crooned his praise, swooning over the babe with that fine brown frame, the song surely described the 23-year-old Evelyn.
So when the band leader announced a nationwide competition for the official title of Miss Fine Brown Frame, Evelyn signed up to see for herself.
She selected a yellow green fitted dress that illuminated her dark brown skin and ventured from Freeport, Long Island to Harlem's Golden Gate Ballroom, located at 640 Lennox Avenue
at West 142nd Street across the street from the famous Cotton Club.
It was also on the same block as the similarly famous Savoy Ballroom where Buddy Johnson recorded Fine Brown Frame with his 16-piece orchestra.
The spot was crammed for the finals as contestants flocked to Harlem from as far away as Georgia and as close as the Bronx.
Supporters, local community members, U.S.
servicemen, radio personalities, and journalists all gathered to see the brown bombshell from Buddy Johnson's song materialized.
Evelyn hoped it was her.
After the semifinal round, however, the very brown Evelyn worried that she wouldn't get a fair chance at the title.
The word fair is used deliberately to refer to the preferred complexion for 1940 era's black beauty contestants.
These fair skinned beauties were also called light, bright, and damn near white.
None of those words would
ever describe Evelyn, who became convinced that her dark skin would deny her the crown.
The entire field of Miss Fine Brown Framed contestants paled in comparison to Evelyn.
She'd chosen a chartreuse ensemble in the hopes that the garment would highlight her natural assets and propel her to victory.
Instead, the judges deemed her dress to be too tailored.
Evelyn felt relieved to squeak by in the preliminary round, but feared that this would be the end of her journey.
She would have no chance at the prizes, which could improve her life and jumpstart her modeling career.
The contest offered $300 in cash, a silver loving cup, four weeks of well-paid theater engagements with the Johnson band, a film contract with the association producers for
Negro Pictures, and contracts for a series of commercial endorsements.
Looking around the backstage dressing room, however, Evelyn thought that her fine brown frame would be defeated by a light brown frame.
Unless something drastically changed, the light is right approach that colorism usually affirmed in these situations.
With only an hour remaining till the final round, Evelyn Sanders needed a miracle.
So she would make one.
Evelyn bolted from the Golden Gate Ballroom to the nearest fabric store.
She selected a white stretchy material printed with a large-scale dark abstract design.
With less than 60 minutes before final judging, Evelyn would aim for victory with a needle, thread, and nerve.
She noticed that most of the contestants were wearing traditional ball gowns, expected for the final.
A few young women made last-minute wardrobe changes to stand out from those in formal attire.
Evelyn knew she was behind the eight ball of anti-black colorism effectively in last place after the semi-final.
She knew she had to make something dramatic and compelling that would propel her past the 24 fairer competitors.
She needed a look that would enhance her frame without being too tailored, like the dress she'd worn earlier in the competition.
Ultimately, she created a design that had debuted in France
earlier that summer.
Now it's unclear whether the similarity was deliberate or coincidental, but Evelyn stitched a garment that highlighted every inch of her fine brown frame.
Evelyn made a bikini.
The bikini was named for Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands that was the site of the first public nuclear bomb testing in 1946.
White Frenchman Louis Royard
sought to capitalize on the widespread publicity of the nuclear bomb tests by giving his design the same name.
The slight garment was a radically new creation.
The bikini was the first swimsuit to expose a woman's navel.
It didn't require much fabric as only 30 square inches were used to make the first one.
Choyard called it four triangles of nothing.
and proclaimed that a two-piece bathing suit was not a bikini unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring.
Royard had a difficult time finding models to promote the bikini.
He ultimately turned to those that specialized in nude modeling when the fashion models refused to wear his design publicly.
The Vatican declared it sinful.
It was banned from beaches in parts of France and Germany for decades on the grounds of immorality.
American broadcast regulations long prevented women's navels from being shown on the screen.
The bikini became more known when the hit song, Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini became its anthem in 1960.
And even that wasn't pro bikini since the song was about someone who was deeply embarrassed by wearing one.
But that is 14 years into Evelyn's future.
In 1946, Evelyn didn't call her garment a bikini, nor did Ebony Magazine, who reported on the contest.
Yet the response to Evelyn's swimsuit was as explosive as when it emerged on the beaches of San Tropez earlier that year.
When Evelyn stepped out on stage,
The crowd went wild.
According to Ebony Magazine, the audience instantly and noisily voted heard the finest brown frame seen in many years.
Evelyn's quickly sewn swimwear was not the only bathing suit on stage for the Miss Fine Brown Frame final round.
It is, however, the only one that enlisted an overwhelmingly favorable response.
as the black audience commenced to clapping their fingers down to the nubs, Ebony says, in support.
Evelyn's risky gambit had worked, or so she thought.
Evelyn's daring garment activated the crowd, but failed to sway the judges.
Ms.
Fine Brown Frame was meant to be selected by the assembled panel of local black celebrities and radio personalities.
And these men had chosen quote, a light skinned Dixie Belle as their champion.
Now what happens next is how one miracle begets another.
In making her attire for the final round,
Evelyn connected with the black audience of servicemen and community members.
Many of the men and women in the crowd, looking at the archival photos at least, were the same complexion as Evelyn, and they knew a fine brown frame when they saw one.
Ebony Magazine reports that the audience would have none of it.
And they articulately let Maestro Johnson know that for once, the white standards of beauty would not be forced upon them.
Evelyn's bikini had so transfixed the Golden Gate Ballroom that the audience took the matter of the contest into their own hands.
Their raucous applause, cheers, and whistles made it clear to the judges that Evelyn's fine brown frame was the best.
Their acclaim for Evelyn and her garment shifted the winds of the contest in her favor.
The judges, recognizing the mood churning through the densely packed crowd,
decided to split the victory between Evelyn and her light-skinned rival.
They were going to award Evelyn the cash and the light-skinned girl the title.
The Golden Gate ballroom crowd, however, did not have a compromising spirit that night.
Fists shot up from the audience in response to the suggestion that Evelyn deserved only a partial win.
Ebony Magazine describes the contest's conclusion with an air of reluctant inevitability, saying, so finally, to tremendous acclaim, Evelyn Sanders was crowned Miss Fine Brown
Frame, probably the darkest and one of the most exotic beauty contest winners in Harlem in a decade.
In the magazine's story about the contest, Evelyn is pictured in her bikini smiling to an adoring crowd.
She is flanked by a few finalists, lighter skinned women in gowns and traditional bathing costumes.
But the stage is mostly stuffed with men in suits, smiling at Evelyn or playing to the enthusiastic audience.
Buddy Johnson presents a joyous Evelyn with the Miss Fine Brown Frame trophy.
Evelyn's bikini won her the title, but its benefits were another matter.
According to Ebony Magazine, she was having a tough time fighting for her queendom
now that her Golden Gate supporters were not around to back her.
Now, Ms.
Fionn Brown-Frame was meant to win $300, of which Evelyn received $200.
The title also included appearances at the famed Apollo Theater.
Now, Evelyn got her stint at the Apollo, but only after a famous comedian advocated on her behalf.
Evelyn would ultimately secure an attorney to receive the contest's prizes.
This reluctance
To give a dark skinned beauty queen the same benefits that would easily be given to a light skinned Dixie Belle, the one that the judges wanted, was a sign of the anti-black
colorism that prevailed in the era.
This reluctance makes Evelyn's victory that much sweeter.
Dismantling colorism makes her place in history as the first to wear a bikini in Ebony magazine that much more meaningful.
thinking and death stitches upended the colorist hierarchy that would have erased her from the competition entirely.
Instead, she has a multi-page spread and one of the leading black periodicals of her day.
She won the contest and secured her place in history.
And this is why I say that black women stitch liberation.
Evelyn Sanders made her achievement possible.
Her creativity and quick thinking
secured a beauty title against the field of preferred candidates.
She stitched her way into a position that the judges did not want her to have.
She exposed and dismantled the colorism that had long prevailed and continues to operate as a beauty standard.
Evelyn was the darkest beauty queen Harlem had seen in 10 years.
Also,
The first bikini to be in Ebony magazine would not be one of the light bright girls that appear in most of its ads.
Instead, it would be a dark skinned black woman comfortable in her own skin named Evelyn Sanders, who stitched her place in history.
This is how black women stitch liberation.
This is how we use sewing to give ourselves what others would deny us.
Sewing is the technology by which inert material can be brought to life and increase its longevity.
For me, sewing is more than a basic life skill.
It is a stitch of liberation.
As the poet oracle Alexis Pauline Gumb says, freedom is not a secret.
It is a practice.
Sewing is vital to how I practice freedom, create new space and refresh old ones.
Sewing is the way that I express bodily autonomy by creating things that I want, regardless of what retailers say I'm meant to have.
Sewing lets me visually communicate kinship when I make my signature matching outfits for the multiracial family for my spouse and kids.
Sewing gives me unique garments to symbolize renewal for Easter and fresh starts for the first day of school.
I've practiced stitching freedom by making bras
outerwear, jeans, dresses, quilts and duvet covers, umbrellas, sneakers, sandals, tents, 50 leaven pairs of drawers, and even a dress for a 20 foot tall protest puppet.
I find possibility in the humming joyful rhythm of the sewing machine, feeding the fabric under the dancing needle, stitching something that would not otherwise exist if I did not
choose to make it.
is an affirmation of my creative capacity.
Sewing connects me to the six generations of my Black Southern family who stitched beautiful and fulfilling lives from the scraps of America's broken promises.
Evelyn Sanders' victory wasn't just about winning a title.
It was about making space for herself in a world that sought to marginalize her.
Her bold, creative act of stitching her way into history
was a powerful reclamation of her beauty and autonomy that defied the colorist norms of the time.
This is how black women use stitching as a freedom practice, by using sewing to create what others would deny us, transforming materials into garments of self-expression.
As you know, the slogan of the Stitch Please podcast is that we will help you get your stitch together.
And were I to ask Evelyn Sanders this question, I imagine that she might say, believe in yourself, trust yourself, trust your creativity and believe that even though the odds seem
stacked against you, that you have the ability to right wrongs.
you have the ability to prevail.
Look back at our history to learn lessons that can benefit us now and in the future.
The Stitch Please podcast is filled with stories from Black women who show how sewing is more than a life skill.
It's a practice of autonomy, creativity, and possibility.
Through their voices, you'll discover how stitching can be more than meets the eye.
I hope you'll join us for the next episode or explore our archive of more than 250 episodes and we'll help you get your stitch together.
You've been listening to Stitch Please, the official podcast of Black Women Stitch, the sewing group where Black Lives Matter.
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