Written by: Bryce Covert, Racked

Anyone who tunes in to the annual State of the Union on January 30th, when President Donald Trump will address Congress and give an update on his agenda, may notice something different about the audience seated in front of him. The 65 members of the Democratic Women’s Working Group who attend the speech this year will be clothed all in black.

If this calls to mind women in Hollywood wearing black gowns at the Golden Globes this year, it is intentional: The plan is meant to show solidarity with the new Time’s Up campaign against sexual harassment. But it’s also intended to express solidarity with all “women who have been sexually harassed and abused,” explained Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman.

“We want to show solidarity with the #MeToo movement, really to first basically thank the victims of sexual harassment who have had the courage to come forward,” Rep. Lois Frankel said. “To have solidarity with… folks who are fighting for a cultural shift that enables men and women to work side by side in safety and dignity free of sexual harassment.”

“We’re wearing black in unison to show we’re speaking up,” Rep. Brenda Lawrence added. “This is our time. Me too, time’s up.”

The chairs of the Democratic Women’s Working Group are organizing the effort: Frankel, Lawrence, and Rep. Jackie Speier. Frankel sent an invitation to wear black to everyone in Congress, so some men will also wear black, and Republicans might even join in. “We’re not trying to make this partisan,” she said. “Sexual harassment knows no party.”

For women seated in the audience, unable to respond to whatever the president might say during his speech, clothing has now twice been the chosen mode of protest. Last year, a group of women in Congress wore all white to Trump’s first State of the Union, an echo of the women’s suffrage movement: Those women frequently wore all white, and it was one of the movement’s three official colors. Hillary Clinton also wore white in a nod to women’s suffrage during her campaign against Trump for the White House, in particular when she gave her speech accepting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention — and when she became the first woman to clinch the nomination of a major party. Geraldine Ferraro wore white when she was the first woman to accept the vice presidential nomination of a major party.

“Last year we wore white really as a reaction to the election of the president, who we thought… had the possibility of doing some really bad things to women with his policies,” Frankel said. “Of course, our fears came true.”

This year women will repeat the gesture by clothing themselves in black to make a similar statement. It’s the most effective method of protest that members will have at their disposal during Trump’s speech.

“Obviously I think a lot of times we’d like to sit there and shout back at this president,” Frankel said. “But we felt that under the circumstances, we should have excellent decorum and be dignified.”

“Here we are again with his State of the Union — lord only knows what he will say,” Lawrence said. But no matter what Trump says, the women of Congress will use their clothing to speak back. “I don’t want to sit there business as usual,” she added. “I have to do something.”

So they selected a quiet, visual protest. “We really felt that the only real statement we could make sitting as a block in the State of the Union was with the color of our clothing,” Frankel explained. The State of the Union, she pointed out, is viewed by tens of millions of people, not just in the United States but also abroad. So the message they send with their clothes could have a wide reach.

“What we’re trying to establish is a uniformity of solidarity,” Watson Coleman said. “The prominent way of doing that is to agree to wear the same color.”

But the women of Congress don’t just want their black clothing to serve as a rebuke of the president. “The issue is much bigger than Donald Trump,” Frankel said. “This is a message to the hotel workers who are getting jumped and the waitresses who are getting pinched and the women on the farm who may be assaulted by their bosses.”

They also want it to be a call to arms. “This has to do with the policies moving forward,” Watson Coleman said. “It is to remind people that we need to stand up against this kind of behavior.” Frankel noted, for example, that the Women’s Caucus plans to hold a series of hearings that will invite people who have experienced sexual harassment to share their stories. The goal will be to develop policy changes and new laws that could address the epidemic.

Attached to the black garments of Congressional Black Caucus members will also be small red pins in honor of Recy Taylor. Taylor was an African-American woman who was abducted and repeatedly raped by six white men in 1944 Alabama on her walk home from church. The men threatened to kill her if she spoke out, but she still testified against them. Despite all of the rapists being identified and one confessing, the case never went to trial after two all-white, all-male grand juries refused to indict them.

“She was one of the first women, when we talk about #MeToo and Time’s Up, at a time when she didn’t have a voice she used her voice and fought back,” said Lawrence, who is also helping organize the effort to wear the pins.

It’s a tactic that women have drawn on before. “Whether it’s the suffragettes, or for Planned Parenthood it’s pink, it’s a statement that women often make,” Frankel said. Just look at how many donned pink “pussy” hats — a symbol that provoked legitimate criticisms about the exclusion of women of color and trans women — for the two Women’s Marches, or the red women wore for last year’s mass strike on International Women’s Day.

This particular State of the Union comes amid the #MeToo moment and a large, public reckoning with widespread sexual harassment and abuse. “I think we’re in more of a movement than a moment. I certainly hope so,” Watson Coleman said. But Trump himself exposes how complicated the reckoning is: At least 20 women have already come forward with allegations spanning the course of more than three decades. “We’ve got a president who has allegations against him by upwards of 19 women that he sexually abused and harassed and assaulted them,” she said. “So if for no other reason it is to remind him of the decency and dignity and respect that he should have for women.”

The pins “are in remembrance of an individual, but they speak more to the larger issue of the fact that women of color, especially black women, have experienced this abuse and this harassment and this physical violent assault upon them, but that sometimes their issues are not given the same kind of media attention,” Watson Coleman added. “It’s a reminder that all women are affected by sexual harassment and assault and rape and it’s not a reflector of your race or your age or your economic station.”

The Congressional Black Caucus has bought enough of the pins that any other member can also wear them. Frankel said she will wear a pin and guessed others outside the caucus will do the same.

Female members of Congress hope that State of the Union watchers hear what they have to say with their clothes.

“I hope that Americans, as well as anybody else that’s listening in and watching the State of the Union, knows why we are wearing black, knows why we’re wearing these red pins,” Watson Coleman said. “Knows that we’re standing up and standing against behavior that is illegal, it is unconstitutional, and it is absolutely terrible.”

Recy Taylor “had courage,” Lawrence pointed out. “That’s something we need to think about. Because this time in history requires courage, political courage, moral conviction. So that’s the message I want to send.

“I’m using my voice… and I will continue,” she said.

Correction: January 24th, 2018

This article initially stated it was the Congressional Women’s Caucus and not the Democratic Women’s Working Group that has 65 members who will be wearing black.