eight• Lend Me a Tiara

In the 1960s, valiant Americans put their bones and bodies, their livelihoods and lives on the line to halt the ravages of racism. At the decade’s opening, black people in many places could not safely vote, attend integrated schools and universities, marry a white person, purchase a home in a nice neighborhood, or sit at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. We had never had a post-Reconstruction U.S. senator, major airline pilot, Supreme Court justice, network TV drama star, mayor of a large city, NBA coach, congresswoman, member of the New York Stock Exchange, or Vogue magazine cover girl.

By the end of the decade, African Americans—determined that the blood of civil rights martyrs not be spilled in vain—were rewriting history with a vengeance. Ed Brooks was sworn in as U.S. senator from Massachusetts. Marlon Green was hired as a passenger-airline pilot. Thurgood Marshall became associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Bill Cosby was a co-star of NBC’s I Spy. Carl B. Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland, Bill Russell coached basketball’s Boston Celtics, Shirley Chisholm was seated in the U.S. House of Representatives, Joseph Searles III joined the New York Stock Exchange, and model Donyale Luna graced the cover of British Vogue.

As an aspiring journalist and mother of two small children, I did not march or sit in; nor did I face down lacerating fire hoses, snarling police dogs, or swinging clubs. Like most African Americans, I watched the explosive confrontations on TV news and felt profound respect for our freedom fighters on the front lines. But also like many African Americans, I became more attuned to everyday injustices—and I began to look for everyday ways to advance the causes of equality and black pride.

One such opportunity presented itself in September 1960, when I was among the 85 million television viewers who tuned in to watch the Miss America pageant broadcast from Atlantic City.

Nobody had to tell me that a dark-skinned girl was ineligible to be Miss America: everybody knew the crown was reserved for white girls only. The rare occasions when the pageant included African Americans had been demeaning, such as the 1923 competition in which blacks played the roles of slaves during a Court of Neptune musical extravaganza. By the 1930s, the exclusion was made explicit with Pageant Rule #7, which required that Miss America contestants “be of good health and of the white race.”

By the 1940s, contestants were required to complete a biological data sheet tracing their ancestry as far back as possible—preferably to the May-flower. And in 1945, when pageant grand maestro Lenora Slaughter watched concert pianist Bess Myerson compete in a pageant preliminary, she proposed that Myerson change her name to something that sounded less ethnic. “I was a Jew and proud of it, and I was going to stay a Jew,” Myerson would later explain. “I was already losing my sense of who I was; already I was in a masquerade, marching across stage in bathing suits. I kept telling myself it was OK, that if that’s what I had to do to win, then I could do it. But whatever was left of myself I had to keep.” She kept her name and won, becoming the first Miss America who was Jewish.

But not until 1970 would a state be so rebellious as to send a black contestant to the Miss America Pageant; and ironically the color barrier would be broken by one of the whitest states in the nation: Iowa. It would be 1984 before we would see one of our own crowned Miss America. Vanessa Williams of New York would set two precedents, winning the title and then resigning several months later after the appearance of old photos of her posing nude. Her first runner-up and her ultimate replacement, Miss New Jersey Suzette Charles, also was African American; and in recent years, several black women have won the pageant.

That future was unimaginable in the early 1960s—a time when black females never saw themselves celebrated as beauties in the movies, on television, or in best-selling fashion magazines; and when TWA had recently defended its decision not to hire its first black stewardess on the grounds that the applicant wasn’t “attractive enough.” Popular media gave us limited bandwidth: we were portrayed either as maids, Aunt Jemimas, or prostitutes.

The prototype of a “beautiful woman” in the mainstream culture of the day had a slim build, blonde hair, and blue eyes. Social science research would later establish that mulattos and lighter-toned African Americans had better employment prospects than their darker counterparts.

Internalizing this racism, many black females put themselves through a tortuous process trying to appear “less black”—straightening the kinks out of their hair, bleaching their skin, minimizing their curvaceous bodies, and even occasionally clamping their wider noses with clothespins in a preposterous attempt to narrow them. I inwardly winced every time we at KDIA aired a spot from one of our national sponsors, ARTRA skin lightening cream. On the other hand, I joined millions of other black women in treating my hair to make it smoother and straighter.

But I also had no doubt that attractive girls and women came in all colors, from pale porcelain to glorious ebony. And if the Miss America Pageant was too stubbornly prejudiced to see that, I decided, we should simply initiate a contest all our own.

Negro beauty pageants had been around for a while, although all too often they rewarded contestants with the most “passable” Caucasian complexion. This inflicted “pigmentocracy,” however, was destined to fall out of favor. At Harlem’s Miss Fine Brown Frame Contest in 1947, when the judges passed over dark-skinned, curvaceous audience favorite Evelyn Sanders and selected instead a light-skinned competitor, turmoil ensued. As Ebony magazine reported, the crowd—which included World War II veterans impatient with their own country’s prejudices—let the judges “know that, for once, white standards of beauty would not be forced upon them.” Organizers sought to mollify the audience by offering to bestow the title upon the lighter contestant and award Sanders the three-hundred-dollar cash prize: a Solomonic solution that left the outraged audience shaking their fists. Before the night was over, Sanders had the title and the cash.

By the 1960s, a patchwork of Negro beauty pageants was thriving coast to coast, but they tended to be haphazard, bargain-basement imitations of Atlantic City’s main event. An exception was a pageant launched in Southern California by glamour photographer Howard Morehead, whom I knew because of his work for Jet magazine. Freelancing had allowed him daily contact with a bevy of black beauties around Hollywood who were ambitious, talented, and frustrated. His awareness of this untapped potential led him to create a beauty contest that offered not only prizes and schol arships, but also screen tests with major film studios for the winners and top talent contestants. His Miss Bronze California Pageant had been going strong for a few years before I decided, in 1961, to produce a Miss Bronze Pageant for Northern California.

“Let’s face it—Negro girls never get selected in beauty pageants,” I told the San Francisco Examiner. “That’s what inspired the Miss Bronze contest, and we hope in time to make it so popular the other beauty events will also want our girls.”

The pageant was open to unmarried African American women ages seventeen to twenty-five, from the Oregon border all the way south to Fresno. I recruited contestants in the Bay Area via my newspaper column, my radio show, and even church appearances. Eventually Sacramento, Merced, and Fresno staged their own local pageants, with their winners advancing to the Miss Bronze Northern California finals. The winner and first runner-up, as well as the talent-competition victor, were awarded free trips to Los Angeles to compete in the Miss Bronze California Pageant finals.

I did everything I could to make the competition affordable to all young women. Entrance was free, as were the required charm school classes. We secured donated swimsuits for the contestants—always modest one-pieces, to keep the churches happy—and provided stipends for their evening gowns. Local merchants donated other supplies; Gallenkamps, for example, gave contestants free shoes and charged only the cost of dyeing them to match the gowns.

At the outset, the price tag for an authentic tiara exceeded our budget, so we arranged to borrow the one Howard used for the Southern California Pageant, which he in turn had borrowed from Miss Universe Pageant officials. While I wouldn’t stake my life on it, the pearl-encrusted tiara was said to be valued at a million dollars.

“Productions like the Miss Bronze California will do more for integration than all of the money spent down South,” the crown’s creator, James Boutross, brazenly claimed, “because you show the Negro in a dignified light.”

Also in the interest of affordability, out-of-town qualifiers for Miss Bronze Northern California stayed at my Berkeley house for a week or more before the pageant. They slept on couches or our living room floor, which made for one gigantic, giggly pajama party—with Bill, Steven, Darolyn, and me accommodating these effervescent young women.

As the unofficial mother hen, I laid down firm rules: No smoking. No drinking. No inappropriate language. Curfew at a respectable hour. And absolutely no dating any men connected with the pageant.

More than once I had to cross my arms and place myself between a naive contestant and a male sponsor who mistakenly presumed that his contribution entitled him to special access. The girls nicknamed me “The Steel Fist inside the Velvet Glove.”

Each young woman was put through her paces at Charm Unlimited, a Berkeley poise and grooming school founded by my ex-husband’s second cousin, Shelby Davis, and his wife, Tonita. Shelby—an elegant looker whose favorite word was glitter—eventually served as a pageant co-producer. Tonita, the school’s directress, cut a striking figure in stockings and high heels, long nails perfectly polished, hair impeccably coiffed, carriage erect. Behind the carefully constructed image, both had checkered pasts, including financial finagling that had once landed him behind bars. But they were determined to forge reputable new careers—Tonita, for example, enrolled in every conceivable modeling class. Their charm school became popular with Southerners transplanted into the foreign culture of California, because it promised to “open so many doors for ambitious and forward-looking Negro women.” The advertisements that Tonita wrote for Charm Unlimited appealed to the insecurities of these black women, who craved greater opportunities but were unschooled in the intricacies of bourgeois life:

Tonita instructed our contestants on how to glide in heels, to sit with their legs discreetly crossed at the ankles, and to delicately pat the corners of their lips with table napkins. “And ladies,” she would whisper in a confidently conspiratorial tone, “always carry a little room deodorizer to spray after you use the restroom. Remember, a lady never leaves an unpleasant odor behind her!”

To underscore that beauty is more than skin deep, we required contestants to fulfill hours of community service through organizations such as the Red Cross. And they were to perform a talent of their choice, be it a poetry recitation, an Afro-Cuban dance, or a vocal solo.

The finalists then fielded questions posed by judges before an audience. “Could you tell us what kind of social change you would like to see in your lifetime?” the judges asked contestant Stephani Jo Swanigan, an Oakland City College criminology student who would go on to become Miss Bronze California 1963. “As grateful as I am for the Miss Bronze Pageant,” she replied, “I look forward to the day when there will be no need for a separate contest for Negro girls.”

The Miss Bronze Northern California Pageant debuted at the Surf Club at San Francisco’s Playland at the Beach, and it played to a full house of about five hundred spectators. I was adamant that it be a regal affair, and I supervised the design of an elaborate set.

Over the next few years, the pageant moved to the Jack Tar Hotel, which had opened in 1960 to protests for having hired only a few African Americans—and only as doormen and maids. Pressure from groups such as the NAACP soon forced the Jack Tar to hire at least one black person to fill each of these staff positions—clerk, room-service attendant, accountant, and bartender; and the community was encouraged to reward this compromise by patronizing the hotel. In later years we moved the pageant to the San Francisco Hilton near Union Square and, finally, to the crown jewel of San Francisco hotels, the Grand Ballroom of the Fairmont atop tony Nob Hill.

Our first winner, Cynthia Badie, was a stunning beauty with a dark complexion, all the more accented by her sleeveless ivory gown and long gloves. She had grown up with relatives teasingly calling her “Blackie”; but they had also complimented her for being adorable, and she later said she never had any trepidation about competing against young women of a lighter hue.

“We try to avoid those who are too Caucasian in their features,” I told reporters in the early years. “And skin color varies, but I might tell you this—the fairer she is, the less chance she seems to have of winning. The girl should look like a Negro.”

But having made my point early on, I ultimately had to confront the reality that we risked perpetuating our own form of discrimination by penalizing lighter contestants. In the six years I produced Miss Bronze Northern California, we crowned African American girls with a variety of complexions.

I always secured an integrated panel of judges. That meant enlisting black friends including Nancy Wilson and Don Barksdale as well as Ebony magazine West Coast editor Louis Robinson and Mission Impossible TV star Greg Morris. Approximately half of our judges were white, and they included KDIA station manager Walter Conway, San Francisco Chronicle “Advice to the Lovelorn” columnist Monique Benoit, Columbia Records rep Del Costello, and Miss San Francisco 1962, Sally Ann Hamberlin.

We also one-upped the Miss America Pageant in the crooning serenader department. Let Atlantic City have its Bert Parks, I thought. We snared young newcomer Lou Rawls.

Still, we struggled to garner coverage outside the black community press. For our first news conference, we assembled all the girls in bathing suits around the outdoor pool at the new Jack Tar Hotel. Only one photographer showed up, and he was lackadaisical about the assignment, admitting that it was unlikely that his paper, the San Francisco Examiner, would deem the pageant worth a photo.

“Look,” he cracked, “the only way you’re likely to get any attention is if you toss one of those girls into the pool.”

We huddled with the girls; we evaluated our options and calculated whose hair could emerge from a dip in chlorinated water and still look good; and then, settling on a plucky willing contestant, we obligingly tossed her in the pool.

The photographer was right: the Examiner ran the picture alongside an advance story on the Miss Bronze Northern California Pageant.

Our sponsors likewise extracted a toll for their support. They created ads featuring our contestants, clad in swimsuits, posing while pumping gas at Art Dickens Chevron Service Station, alongside a car from the Merit Lincoln-Mercury dealership, and in front of cases of soda from the Pepsi Bottling Company. But the young women had no objection, given that many of them aspired to be models and therefore valued the exposure.

We promoted the pageant with motorcades and receptions, and even had the contestants introduced at a Giants game, where they were thrilled to meet legendary slugger Willie Mays. By 1966, California governor Pat Brown sent a congratulatory letter, which we of course incorporated into the program.

Miss Bronze Northern California received an array of thirty prizes, including expenses to the state pageant, a diamond wristwatch, a day at Disneyland, a case of Coca-Cola, a portable TV, one hundred gallons of Gulf Oil gasoline, and a “100 percent human hair wig” from the Purple Poodle Wig Shoppe.

The talent competition was judged separately, with “Miss Grand Talent” garnering an all-expense-paid trip to the state pageant and prizes—including a silver fox stole, two hair permanents, a charm school scholarship, a gift package of Frito-Lay products, and a photographic portrait shot by my husband.

As the 1966 program said, Miss Bronze contestants “entertain, innovate and they integrate. For as they project poise, personality, talent and ability, many doubts are dispelled; there is no barrier that can withstand their charming challenge.”

I remain proud of our success stories. Some contestants would go on to careers in the entertainment industry and credit Miss Bronze for making it possible. Marilyn McCoo and Florence LaRue won the state pageant talent competition in 1962 and 1963 respectively, and a man named Lamonte McLemore was one of the pageant’s photographers. The three went on to become three-fifths of The 5th Dimension, a 1960s pop musical sensation that recorded classics such as “Up, Up and Away” and “Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In.” McCoo later recorded with her husband, Billy Davis Jr., and collected a lifetime total of eight Grammys.

I took a direct role in managing the early career of vocalist Carolyn Blakey, a Sacramento standout with her 1963 pageant rendition of “When Sonny Gets Blue.” I helped book her initial gigs in Barksdale’s club and other local venues. Because she was merely nineteen years old, I shielded her from predatory advances by requiring her to sit at the side of the bar under the watchful bartender’s eye, or wait in the club manager’s office between sets. A concert promoter in the pageant night audience offered her an international booking, and soon she had circled the globe—singing in Australia, Iran, Pakistan, Lebanon, Greece, and in Italy with doomed rocker Jimi Hendrix. Eventually she was cast on Broadway in Hair and posed for a Playboy magazine spread on the “American Tribal Lock-Rock Musical,” although she was adamant that she would only be photographed wearing her tie-dyed costume.

Another Miss Bronze Pageant winner, Beverly Johnson, would go on to become the first black woman to grace the cover of American Vogue magazine in 1974. And contestant Margaret Avery would later be nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as the blues singer Shug Avery in the film The Color Purple.

Throughout their Miss Bronze experience, the contestants felt pampered and validated—and also exhilarated to jettison the racist stereotype that Negro girls could not be honored as beautiful. Our pageant came of age along with the “Black is Beautiful” movement, and our goal was to take us as black women out of the realm of “the other.”

Sociology professor Maxine Leeds Craig would later produce a thoughtful analysis of the historic role of Negro beauty pageants in her book, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty and the Politics of Race. As she astutely noted, those of us who organized the Miss Bronze Northern California competition “attempted to uncouple race from beauty, and color from class.”

If anyone had feminist objections to Miss Bronze, nobody complained to me, even though each program not only featured pictures of the women in swimsuits, but also listed their precise bust, waist, and hip measurements. By the time my career demanded that I give up producing, after the 1966 pageant, no one else was willing to pick up the pieces, and Miss Bronze Northern California ceased to be.

Two years later, a small cadre of women converged on the Atlantic City boardwalk to protest the Miss America Pageant for denigrating and objectifying women. After symbolically crowning a sheep, the women tossed girdles and bras into a trash can—and although the can was never set afire, the event spawned the urban legend that early feminists were “bra burners.” It’s worth noting that they borrowed the tune of the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” substituting the words “We Will Not Be Used.”

Only a few doors down from the main pageant and protesters, the first Miss Black America Pageant was holding its inaugural competition under the direction of J. Morris Anderson of Philadelphia, who had spent time observing our pageant. The next year, the Jackson 5 would make their first television appearance—on the pageant. And in 1971, the competitors would include Miss Tennessee, Oprah Winfrey. The pageant, she would say, “put a flower in my mind.”

I first approached Oakland television station KTVU with the idea of airing a promotional preview of the Miss Bronze Pageant, featuring highlights from the talent competition. It wasn’t an easy sell, but I was persistent. At last, KTVU community affairs director Ian Zellick said, “Well, you know, I can give you the time, but I don’t have any staff to produce this show. So if you can get a producer and a director, we’ll give you the slot and you can do it.”

“Why, of course,” I said with a smile, “I’d be happy to handle that.”

Then I sashayed out of the station and made a beeline for the Oakland Public Library, where my old school chum Rose Mary then was a librarian.

“Rose Mary, help,” I pleaded, “I think I just agreed to direct and produce a Miss Bronze show for television... and I have no idea what a director or producer is supposed to do.”

She calmly led me to the reference area and helped me locate instructional books on TV production, which I checked out and studied, trying to fathom the expectations of my newest unpaid job. I learned how to “backtime” a program, subtracting the required commercials and station announcements to figure out precisely how much air I had to fill. KTVU provided a studio camera crew, I served as the program’s host, and our production went off without a hitch. The Miss Bronze Showcase drew one hundred thousand viewers.

And I had just gotten my first taste of television.