Civil rights photographer Cecil Williams steals the show during NY Fashion Week
Known for his iconic photo drinking from a "White Only" water fountain in 1956, Cecil Williams starred in Actively Black and SPILL's New York Fashion Week show.
In February, Actively Black founder Lanny Smith launched a limited edition collaboration with the legendary civil rights photographer Cecil Williams.
The athleisure brand owner was enamored with what has become Williams’ most famous photo — a 1956 photo of himself drinking from a “White Only” water fountain while looking directly into the camera.
Smith connected with Williams to create apparel showcasing the defiant photo.
Not long after, a torrent of people online claimed the image — taken by Williams’ friend Rendall Harper as they were coming back from a story for JET Magazine — was a fake created by AI.
Smith decided to squash those claims for good on Friday by bringing the South Carolina native out to walk in Actively Black and SPILL’s “Reclamation” New York Fashion Week event.
“Earlier this year, I posted our [Actively Black] collab with [Cecil Williams] and you wouldn’t believe the amount of racists AND Black people that claimed it was AI to discredit it,” Smith wrote in a social media post. “Well … I decided to bring Mr. Cecil himself out to New York Fashion Week to walk in our show and let the folks know he is real and he AINT NEVER SCARED!”
Before he hit the runway, attendees watched a video from Smith’s interview with Williams, where he discussed the photo and what prompted him to drink from the segregated fountain in that moment.
"This was not the only time that I went around the barriers,” Williams, 87, explained in the video. “There were times when I intentionally felt bold enough and sick and tired of living in a segregated society.”
Williams then came out to Bone Crusher’s 2003 hit “Never Scared,” a fitting song for the civil rights icon’s walk down the runway.
The event, which was live-streamed exclusively on the Black-owned social media platform SPILL, featured a host of notable figures: pioneering civil rights activist Ruby Bridges, Ben Haith, designer of the Juneteenth flag, Bernice King, daughter of Martin Luther King, Jr, Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X, marketing executive Bozoma St. John, Olympians John Carlos and Tommie Smith, and more.
“Actively Black has redefined sportswear, and SPILL is redefining social media—so coming together for this cultural moment was inevitable. We’ve been longtime fans of the brand, and the conversations on SPILL about their groundbreaking products and shows have been overwhelmingly positive,” said Alphonzo Terrell, CEO and co-founder of SPILL.
“To now bring that energy to a global stage in real time is an honor—and a powerful example of what it looks like when Black-owned platforms lead the culture both on the runway and online.”
Kenya Parham, chief growth officer at SPILL, thanked Smith and Actively Black co-founder Bianca Winslow for their vision in bringing the show to life.
“The kind of inertia they curated on that New York Fashion Week stage is what rumbles the ancestors. It was a perfectly timed supercharge to remind us of the playbook,” she said. “By witnessing and sharing in the experience, we too are history in the living, and everything we need to get through is quite literally in our DNA.”
Watch the full event below.
Thank you!