The New Breed fashion boutique in Harlem, 1968. (Yale Joel/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

How a 1960s Harlem couple popularized Afrocentric fashion and built a community where black power thrived

In August of 1967, in a cozy apartment on Sullivan Place in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Mable Benning began designing a garment that would symbolize a radical shift in black American politics. Two years after the assassination of Malcolm X, and eight months before Dr. King was gunned down on the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis, Tennessee, there was a feeling of fear, anticipation, and panic about the state of so-called race relations in America. While legislative gains had been achieved through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a younger generation of black Americans were embittered by the racism they’d experienced, and disillusioned by the country’s futility and hypocrisy in waging the Vietnam war. But in that apartment in Brooklyn, what was simply an African print tunic with a scoop-neck, kangaroo-shaped front pocket and two additional pockets beneath the waist would soon define a generation transfixed by the possibility of internationalist and anti-imperialist revolution and the existence of Black Power in America. It was called the dashiki. According to Ethnic Dress in the United States: A Cultural Encyclopedia, the dashiki can be traced back to West and East Africa, where it was worn as a light tunic that offered protection from the sun. Other iterations of the dashiki can be found in the Dogon burial grounds in southern Mali, dating back to the 12th and 13th centuries. The word dashiki originates from dansiki in the Yoruba language (commonly spoken in Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and Ghana), which refers to a vest with short sleeves, commonly worn by working men. Dashikis made their way to the United States in the early 1960s, when members of the Peace Corps who volunteered in regions of West Africa brought them home as souvenirs.

Eldridge Cleaver sporting a dashiki while exiled in Cuba, 1969. (Lee Lockwood/The Life Images Collection/Getty Images)

The idea to mass-produce the dashiki came from Jason and Mable Benning, a young black couple living in New York City. As a black man, Jason Benning yearned for affirmative messages about his history and culture. He decided to quit his post as a professor of Negro history at Queens College in 1967 to start an Afrocentric fashion company called New Breed Clothing. While Jason was in charge of business operations, Mable, a seamstress, designed and made the dashikis. The couple enlisted the talent of other black designers and public figures like Howard Davis, an established shoe designer, William Smith, a clothing designer, Em Bryant, a former New York Knicks basketball player, and Milton Clarke, a New York City Youth Board administrator. “The Breed,” as it was commonly called, was determined to put Afrocentric fashion on the map in America. In January 1968, the Bennings purchased an old brownstone on the corner of West 147 Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem as the company’s storefront. Black youth, influenced by the messages of Black Power from Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks, would flock to the New Breed and purchase the uniform of the socially conscious. In an interview from the time with PBS, Benning stated that the company’s mission was “to create a nation of citizens of the world” where they could “free every person in the world who is enslaved.” Howard Davis, a professor of footwear design at the Parsons School of Design and one of the two surviving members of the original New Breed Clothing, tells Timeline that Benning found him through word of mouth and wanted to have the most talented black designers working for the brand. “I was probably one of the few African American shoe designers at the time,” Davis says. “And when Jason asked me if I knew anything about clothes, I said I did, and I was involved in the New Breed from the time we had our store on St. Nicholas.” He knew that he couldn’t miss the opportunity to become part of what he was sure would be an historical venture. “I just had this feeling I had to be part of it. When Jason told me what he wanted to do with the Breed, I remember thinking, Yes, yes!”

Dashiki fashion advertisements from Ebony magazine in the 1970s.