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:
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
—Flora Tristan (1803–1844)
“... one of the blind spots of most Negroes is their failure to realize that small overtures from whites have a large significance ... I now realize that this feeling inevitably takes possession of one in the bitter struggle for equality. Indeed, I share it. Yet I wonder how we can expect total acceptance to step full grown from the womb of prejudice, with no embryo or infancy or childhood stages.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 10 (1962)
“In our governments the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of government contrary to the sense of the constituents, but from the acts in which government is the mere instrument of the majority.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“It is a protest against the way the world has worked.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)