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Style on Trial: Community leader is pushing for city law to ban the clothing style of sagging pants
Journal Photo by Walt Unks
Mattie Young, a resident of Cleveland Homes, says she has plenty of backers who want the city to outlaw sagging pants.
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Published: August 20, 2008
The young men who shouted at Mattie Young as they passed her apartment yesterday had one message for her: They're not giving up their sagging pants.
Young, who on Monday proposed that the Winston-Salem City Council ban sagging pants, ignored them. She sat on her porch holding petitions bearing the names of people who support her call for a ban. She told the council that she has collected more than 600 names, and volunteers are coming forth to help her gather more names . They call themselves Citizens Against Sagging.
"Everyone is willing to sign them," Young said, "because they are sick and tired of seeing them, too. I know it can be done because it has already been done in other cities."
Young is president of the resident council at Cleveland Homes. She
said that other neighborhood groups and churches are getting involved in the drive.
"I stopped at stores and different places and asked the people about it, and they were ready and willing to sign it," she said.
"I just pray to God that it would work. It is just awful.… Pants are made to be worn around your waist."
The city council has not decided whether to discuss such a ban, but Young's crusade mirrors a nationwide trend. In cities big and small, grass-roots activists -- usually from within the black community -- have asked for bans on sagging pants.
Sagging has its roots in prison culture, said Mark Anthony Neal, a professor of African and African-American Studies at Duke University. Prisoners weren't allowed to wear belts, so their pants sagged.
The trend jumped from prison into street culture, he said. About 20 years ago, hip-hop culture absorbed some elements of street culture and prison culture -- including sagging pants.
"Folks get a little scared of the saggy-jeans style," Neal said. "There has been a long conversation where older elements (of the black community) felt the younger generation is out of touch morally, politically, culturally and spiritually. By addressing that clothing style, it is an attempt to bring that generation back."
Audrey Stephens, who was visiting her daughter yesterday in the Cleveland Homes neighborhood, took a simpler view: Men and boys should wear belts.
"Nobody wants to see them walk around with their pants down," Stephens said. "We have young children walking around. They ought to be role models. They are not being role models; they are ugly."
She said she likes the idea of a law against sagging jeans.
Such cities as Atlanta to Trenton, N.J., have discussed similar bans.
Voters in Riviera Beach, Fla., overwhelmingly approved a ban on sagging pants in March.
Last year, the town of Delcambre, La., enacted an ordinance imposing a maximum $500 fine or a jail term of six months for anyone showing "indecent exposure of his or her person or undergarments."
Nelson Malloy, a member of the Winston-Salem City Council, said he would support such a ban here.
"People are picking up this hip-hop culture, and people are doing it all over the world," Malloy said. "It is something that is not positive and constructive."
But those who wear sagging pants say that it's their style and that they have a right to wear it.
"I'm still going to wear them the way I want to wear them," said Murk Boston, who was walking along Piedmont Circle.
Boston said that an ordinance wouldn't stop him from wearing his pants low.
"There is a time and place where you dress a certain way," Boston said. "We just want to be loose. If we are at work, we are going to be presentable."
Boston works a construction job and dresses differently for work. "Civilized," he said, then smiled.
Ben Piggott is the supervisor of the Sims Recreation Center in the Happy Hill neighborhood. He has already banned sagging pants at the recreation center.
"I offer my kids a rope or a belt," Piggott said, adding that sagging pants are "just not appropriate."
Piggott said that his ban on sagging pants is a way of teaching young people how to dress appropriately.
Kenell Caesar, the assistant supervisor at the center, said he worries about how a ban would affect young black men.
"It could target a tremendous number of young blacks in the community," Caesar said. "It is another thing when you have a law where 80 percent of them could have something on their record because of their pants."
The Rev. John Mendez, the pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church, has preached about sagging . He said he recognizes that youth like to choose fashions that older generations find radical, but he says that some young people have taken things too far by overexposing themselves. But he said he doesn't think that a ban is a solution to the problem.
"In most situations, when parents say, ‘You are not going out looking like that,' they are not going to do it," Mendez said. "For those who have lost that control, the issue is much larger than that in terms of who is going to control the home."
The mayor of Winston-Salem, Allen Joines, said he is not sure about the legality of such a ban. He also said he isn't sure whether checking waistbands is the best use of a police officer's time.
"We can have positive programs in recreation centers and schools that would encourage them to dress in a more appropriate manner," Joines said.
"As long as they are not doing something obscene or exposing themselves, I think we would want to concentrate on preventing crime by giving positive opportunities."
Neal said that sagging is just a clothing style, and that even he sometimes does a double-take at what young people are wearing -- just as people in his parents' generation once did.
"The reality is that all the kids are wearing it," Neal said. "I saw two kids sit down and give a prayer at a Quiznos, wearing their saggy pants."
■ Wesley Young can be reached at 727-7369 or at wyoung@wsjournal.com.
■ Journal reporter Mary Giunca contributed to this report.
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