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:
“I’ve never been afraid to step out and to reach out and to move out in order to make things happen.”
—Victoria Gray, African American civil rights activist. As quoted in This Little Light of Mine, ch. 3, by Hay Mills (1993)
“During the Civil War the area became a refuge for service- dodging Texans, and gangs of bushwhackers, as they were called, hid in its fastnesses. Conscript details of the Confederate Army hunted the fugitives and occasional skirmishes resulted.”
—Administration in the State of Texa, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“... the structure of our public morality crashed to earth. Above its grave a tombstone read, “Be tolerant—even of evil.” Logically the next step would be to say to our commonwealth’s criminals, “I disagree that it’s all right to rob and murder, but naturally I respect your opinion.” Tolerance is only complacence when it makes no distinction between right and wrong.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 2, ch. 2 (1962)
“I rarely speak about God. To God, yes. I protest against Him. I shout at Him. But to open a discourse about the qualities of God, about the problems that God imposes, theodicy, no. And yet He is there, in silence, in filigree.”
—Elie Wiesel (b. 1928)