The Miss Black America pageant is not to be regarded as a black Miss America pageant.
Since its founding in 1968, the organization has forged its own path – with its own syndicated television network – to proudly celebrate the beauty, talent and intelligence of black women, long excluded from mainstream pageants.
In recent years, the pageant’s “rebirth” aims to rekindle its protest roots to address ongoing disparities in perceptions and treatment of minorities, said founder J. Morris Anderson.
“We are really concentrating on some of these problems that existed for black people in the 1960s and still exist today,” Anderson said. “We are aware that there’s an absolute need for this pageant to continue.”
This weekend’s Miss Black America pageant at the Gem Theatre in Kansas City will mark 50 years since the inaugural production, held in Atlantic City hours after the Miss America pageant — and its protests — ended nearby.
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