Miss America pageant boasts multicultural field

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. -- When the Miss America contestants parade down the runway Saturday, they will represent a broad cross-section of America in a competition that has never been a model of inclusiveness.

Miss Alaska Peggy Willman is an Inupiaq Eskimo. Miss South Dakota Vanessa Shortbull is a Lakota Sioux. Miss Delaware Shoha Kirti Parekh is of Indian descent. Six contestants are black, and the competition will be hosted by a black person for the first time ever.

This multiculturalism is a relatively recent development for an event that for more than 30 years excluded minorities of any kind.

"Certainly, it was slow to integrate, but then Miss America has never been a leader in anything, whether it was hairstyles, fashion or anything else," said Angela Osborne, a former pageant staffer and author of "Miss America: The Dream Lives On."

Since it started 81 years ago as a post-Labor Day publicity stunt on the Atlantic City boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant has not been known for diversity.

In the 1950s, Rule 7 of the contestant contract stated: "Contestants must be of good health and of the white race."

Blacks were excluded in other ways, too.

In the first half of the century, the pageant used city firefighters to chauffeur contestants around town. But blacks were barred from the jobs when the fire department began integrating in the 1950s.

"We broke that barrier in 1958 and started doing it, and we were pleased when the first black Miss America was crowned, but in the pageant organization, it was a continual struggle for blacks to participate," said Pierre Hollingsworth, a former president of the NAACP's Atlantic City chapter.

In 1970, Cheryl Browne of Iowa became the pageant's first black contestant. Thirteen years later, Vanessa Williams made history as the first black woman crowned Miss America, but got death threats and other hate mail.

The first runner-up that year was black, too, but she ended the year wearing Williams' crown. Miss New Jersey Suzette Charles took over after Williams resigned when Penthouse magazine published nude photographs of her.

Former Pageant CEO Leonard Horn, who worked for 20 years as a volunteer and as general counsel before he took over in 1987, said he and other pageant officials worked to ensure more women of color were represented at the pageant.

"We wanted to make it more comfortable for non-Caucasian women to enter. We asked the states to make sure there were no impediments, that the women felt comfortable," he said. "The problem, if there was one, was the reluctance of the nonwhites to compete, for whatever reasons they had."

Miss America 1990 Debbye Turner, who is black, said minorities didn't have the same access to pageants as whites.

"Historically, the organizations and individuals that have directed and sponsored the local pageants have simply been in a different part of town than the minorities."

Blacks may have also felt unwelcome, she said.

"There is, in the African-American community, a mindset that this pageant has historically been exclusionary," she said. "Not that it is today, but that was the perception and sometimes perceptions are hard to overcome."

Blacks weren't the only minorities slighted through the years.

The longtime head of the pageant, Lenora Slaughter, tried to persuade Bess Myerson -- the first Jewish woman to win -- to change her name. Myerson, who was Miss America 1945, refused.

There have been three black Miss Americas since Williams and Charles wore the crown, including Turner and Marjorie Vincent, who won back-to-back in 1990 and 1991.

In 2000, Hawaii schoolteacher Angela Perez Baraquio, who is of Filipino descent, became the first Asian-American winner.

Today's minority contestants believe their chances at winning are as good as anyone else's.

"I'm not here because I'm Indian," said Parekh, 24, whose parents were born in India. "I'm a contestant who happens to be Indian," she said.