Pants Hang Low

MeShorn Daniels and Peter Hayes want kids in Louisville — and the rest of the country — to pull up their pants.

Arguing that the sagging-pants fashion trend promotes an unhealthful lifestyle of gangs, crime and violence, they’ve launched the Pull Up Your Pants education campaign, designed to persuade young people to abandon the look — especially pants often worn so low that their underwear, or more, is exposed.

They already have the support of one Louisville Metro Council member, who plans to introduce a resolution in support of their campaign next month.

While the sagging-pants look has been popularized in the rap culture, Councilwoman Judy Green, D-1st District, said the trend has a history in slavery, when masters wouldn’t allow males to wear belts as a way to degrade them.

She said it’s also common in prison populations because prisoners are not allowed to wear belts, which can be used as weapons.

“It’s degrading. In some ways it’s indecent,” Green said. “It dates all the way back to slavery, but our children don’t know the history.”

And today “that type of dress is associated with gangsters and criminal activity,” said Daniels, an assistant block-watch captain for his 40th Street neighborhood in western Louisville. Continue reading the article at Courier-Journal.com…

William Tweedle, a residence hall director at Morehouse College, wants students at the historically black men’s school to get “In the Zone.”

That’s the zone where there’s no cursing, no saggin’ pants, and no use of the word whose plural spelled backward is “saggin.’ All are beneath the image of the Morehouse man, Tweedle said.

Morehouse President Robert Franklin is making the same points to students on a somewhat different plane. He talks about the new “Renaissance man” who is “well-read, well-traveled, well-spoken, well-dressed and well-balanced.”

Franklin, who was named president last year, instituted the practice of giving every freshman a tie and a blazer in the college’s primary color, maroon, as a tangible symbol of the image of a gentleman.

Morehouse is one of several historically black colleges taking action recently to improve dress on campus. Overt dissent on the Morehouse campus has been minimal, but a smattering of bloggers nationally have suggested that schools might be trying to take away students’ freedom of expression.

“Call me crazy, but I didn’t realize that there was a correlation between morality and Brooks Brothers,” Morehouse alumnus Jonathan Walton, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of California, Riverside, wrote in an article on the subject. Continue reading the article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution…

AUGUSTA, Ga.—The local sagging pants debate began more than a year ago on News 12. It may be coming to a dramatic halt. A bid to send saggers to etiquette school failed.

A bid to send saggers to etiquette school failed, and that’s before the real test even begins. The commission says it’s can’t be enforced.

Commissioner Corey Johnson, the guy making the recommendation, took his bid off the table. This comes after his original call to send violators to school got downgraded to a small mention in the current indecent exposure law. The whole idea was to keep people out of jail. That’s where things got sticky.

“That’s reality,” said Commissioner Johnson. “We have to be realistic about it. We will be infringing upon the rights of expression if we do that. So I had to look at the bigger picture.”

“One thing we cannot do is legislate morality,” said commissioner Calvin Holland. “We cannot legislate self respect, but we want our community, especially our young people, to know we are very much concerned.”

The folks in Hyde Park are also concerned after years of battling alleged contamination. The community is now taking matters in their own hands. They are starting by calling for the Hyde Park sub-committee chair Don Grantham to step down.

Continue reading the article at WRDW

Think of it as a crackdown on cracks.

Augusta Commissioner Corey Johnson says the city needs a law against sagging pants, a fashion fad he says has young men dressed as though they’re looking for prison sex.

Unlike ordinances passed in other communities that have raised the ire of civil rights advocates, his version would only cite those whose low belt lines cause “exposure of the buttocks.”

“I’m not trying to infringe on anybody’s rights,” Mr. Johnson said. “I just want young people to think about what they’re doing.”

The trend, popularized by hip-hop artists, originated in penal institutions, where inmates are denied belts and strings to prevent strangulations.

In the free world, saggers usually wear baggy jeans around their thighs or just above the knees, exposing boxer shorts. The town of Delcambre, La., first outlawed the practice in June 2007, and other bans have been passed in Connecticut and the Georgia towns of Hahira, Hawkinsville and Warner Robins.

The American Civil Liberties Union has said that the laws are unconstitutional infringements on free expression that unfairly target young blacks.

Proposed bans are pending in Atlanta and Charleston, S.C. In October, the Waynesboro City Council approved a first reading of an ordinance imposing fines and community service for pants worn three inches below the pelvis, with a final reading expected early next month.

Mr. Johnson’s proposed change to Augusta’s public indecency ordinance will come up for a vote at the Dec. 2 commission meeting. Staff attorney Andrew MacKenzie said at the Public Service Committee meeting Monday that the rule wouldn’t stir as much controversy because it prohibits exposure of body parts, not shorts.

According to a draft, violators doing nothing else wrong could not be arrested or searched. They would be summoned to court and subject to fines of $25 to $150 and eight hours of community service. Minors would be turned over to juvenile court.