A Journey through time, space and purple
🌀 The Color of Change
🟪 Purple has always carried meaning.
Once, it was the color of emperors and kings.
Then, it changed hands.
And with that shift, purple transformed from a symbol of power over people into a symbol of power among people, from a mark of exclusivity to a rallying cry for inclusion, justice, and transformation.
But how did that happen?
How did a color once hoarded by rulers become the fabric of revolution?
The answer begins in London, 1908.
👒 When Purple Became Protest: The Suffragettes
Picture this: Thousands of women marching down the streets of London.
They are dressed with precision—not in the wild disarray of rebellion, but in deliberate elegance:
💜 Purple for dignity
🤍 White for purity
💚 Green for hope
A color-coded message, unmistakable.
This was the strategy of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU)—one of the most radical suffrage groups in the UK.
By wearing purple, these women were claiming the color of kings and flipping its meaning.
Purple was no longer the mark of rulers—it became the uniform of those demanding their rightful place in democracy.
This wasn’t just visual flair.
👀 It was a psychological maneuver.
In a world where women were seen as fragile, chaotic, and unfit for the public sphere, suffragettes used color to control the narrative. They looked regal, poised, undeniable.
And when they were arrested? When their hunger strikes were met with forced feedings and brutality?
🟪 Purple became a symbol of endurance.
✊🏾 Purple in Protest: The 1960s & 70s Feminist Movement
Fast forward to the 1960s and 70s, and purple resurfaces—this time, on the streets of New York, London, and Paris.
💡 Why? Because the second wave of feminism was now tackling a deeper fight:
Not just voting rights, but economic freedom, reproductive justice, and autonomy over their bodies.
🟪 Purple emerged again—this time, in women’s liberation marches, radical feminist manifestos, and anti-violence movements.
📖 Gloria Steinem and the National Organization for Women (NOW) embraced purple as a symbol of resistance to patriarchal control.
🎭 The Lavender Menace, a group of radical lesbian feminists, reclaimed purple against the exclusion of queer voices from mainstream feminism.
👕 Marchers against gender violence wore purple ribbons, a practice that would later evolve into Domestic Violence Awareness campaigns.
🔮 Once again, purple wasn’t just a color—it was a language.
It told the world:
👁 We are still here.
💬 We refuse to be silent.
⚡ We are rewriting the story.
💜 The Lavender Revolution: LGBTQ+ Movements & Purple as Rebellion
Purple’s next great shift came through the queer rights movement.
In the 1970s, Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay politicians in the U.S., encouraged LGBTQ+ communities to reclaim purple as a badge of pride.
💜 Lavender became shorthand for queerness.
💜 Purple bandanas were worn as silent acts of defiance.
💜 The AIDS crisis turned purple into a symbol of mourning—and a demand for action.
🎨 From Pride flags to protest signs, purple became a color of visibility.
Because when a world tries to erase you, to render you invisible—
🟪 Wearing purple is a way of making yourself seen.
🛠️ Purple in Today’s Social Movements: The Color of Collective Power
From the Fight for $15 (a movement demanding a livable wage for workers) to climate justice rallies, purple is still threaded into today’s activism.
🔮 Why? Because purple carries the memory of past struggles.
When striking workers, Indigenous land defenders, or survivors of gender-based violence raise purple banners, they are tapping into a lineage of resistance that stretches back over a century.
Purple is the color of transformation—not just of self, but of systems.
Because if history shows us anything, it’s that meanings can be rewritten.
Power can be redefined.
And even something as simple as a color can be reclaimed—over and over again.