Civil Rights Protest
Also on September 7, 1968, in Atlantic City, a separate civil rights demonstration took place in the form of a beauty pageant as African Americans and civil rights activists gathered to crown the first Miss Black America. The winner, nineteen-year-old, Philadelphia native, Saundra Williams had been active on the civil rights scene prior to the competition. As a student at Maryland State College, she helped organize The Black Awareness Movement with her classmates and staged a sit in at a local restaurant, which refused to serve African Americans.
Born to a middle-class family, Williams aspired to a career in social work and child welfare. She explained her motivation for running in the pageant: “Miss America does not represent us because there has never been a black girl in the pageant. With my title, I can show black women that they too are beautiful.... There is a need to keep saying this over and over because for so long none of us believed it. But now we’re finally coming around.”
The competition, organized by civil rights activist J. Morriss Anderson, was held at the Ritz Carlton a few blocks from Convention Hall, where the Miss America pageant took place the same evening. Unlike the Miss America contenders, the Miss Black America contestants, prior to competition, rode in a convertible motorcade through the streets of Atlantic City and were greeted with cheers and applause, especially from members of the Black community.
Feminist protestor and organizer Robin Morgan said, “We deplore Miss Black America as much as Miss White America but we understand the black issue involved.”
Read more about this topic: Miss America Protest
Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, civil, rights and/or protest:
“The right to vote, or equal civil rights, may be good demands, but true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman’s soul.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Both of us felt more anxiety about the South—about the colored people especially—than about anything else sinister in the result. My hope of a sound currency will somehow be realized; civil service reform will be delayed; but the great injury is in the South. There the Amendments will be nullified, disorder will continue, prosperity to both whites and colored people will be pushed off for years.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“But you must know the class of sweet women—who are always so happy to declare “they have all the rights they want”; “they are perfectly willing to let their husbands vote for them”Mare and always have been numerous, though it is an occasion for thankfulness that they are becoming less so.”
—Eliza “Mother” Stewart (1816–1908)
“To exist is equivalent to an act of faith, a protest against the truth, an interminable prayer.... As soon as they consent to live, the unbeliever and the man of faith are fundamentally the same, since both have made the only decision that defines a being.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)