Being Miss America: Behind the Rhinestone Curtain (Discovering America) by Kate Shindle Page B

from her in the first place.” For this institution entering its seventh decade, the need to re-brand was critical. But as long as the pageant was limited to its standard structure of crowning and uncrowning its winners, it would be very hard to create a new and exciting identity. What was needed was a Miss America who could shake things up
during
her twelve-month reign.
    1984 was a year of significant change around the world: Russia boycotted the Los Angeles Olympics, Indira Ghandi was assassinated and Ferdinand Marcos was protested, Hezbollah car-bombed the United States Embassy in Beirut and kidnapped CIA station chief William Francis Buckley, the UK coal miners began a yearlong strike, Apple marketed the first Macintosh personal computers, and the Space Shuttle
Challenger
launched its first (and, tragically, final) mission. And Miss America, appropriately forthis context, would change more in twelve months than she had in decades. The road to this transformation began in a middle-class town in Westchester County, New York.
    The great irony, of course, is that no one—including Miss America 1984 herself—ever expected that she actually would wear the coveted crown.
    Much has been made of the birth announcements sent out in the spring of 1963, when Milton and Helen Williams shared the news that they had added a baby girl to their family. Vanessa Lynne Williams was presented to the world via cards that read “Here She Is—Miss America!” (yet another of the many, many inaccurate iterations of the pageant’s “There She Is” catchphrase). Her parents’ choice has been called prescient, even eerie; in reality, the cards were standard fill-in-the-blank types bought at a stationery store.
    In fact, it’s highly unlikely that the Williams family imagined their child’s future so vividly. At the time, women of color were few and far between at Miss America. Aside from Bess Myerson and Norma Smallwood, no woman of an ethnic or racial minority had ever worn the crown. Black contestants began competing at the Miss America level in 1970, but it was 1980 before Arkansas’s Lencola Sullivan became the first to finish in the top five.
    Vanessa Williams does not seem to have grown up with the Miss America title in her sights. Although the pageant is fond of claiming that “every little girl dreams of being Miss America,” there was no way that a young African American child in the 1960s could have anticipated exactly when she and her peers might actually be allowed to enter the contest. Instead, Williams channeled her energy into the performing arts. After being voted “Best Actress” in her high school graduating class, she continued her studies in the highly regarded musical theater program at Syracuse University. While it’s always been fashionable for Miss America contestants to bury their ambition by claiming that they entered the pageant on a lark—or even a dare—Williams’s own account appears to verify that in at least one case, this was the reality. In the midst of her college years, she was aggressively recruited by a director from the Miss Greater Syracuse pageant. She needed scholarship money, and the show she was scheduled to perform in had been abruptly canceled. So she decided to give it a go.
    In September of 1983, Vanessa Williams was not the only African American contestant at the pageant; in fact, four black women were among the state representatives. Unlike the other forty-six titleholders who arrived in Atlantic City that year, the minority women were treated by the media as almost an “other.” While they were lauded for having made it onto the traditionally white playing field, they were simultaneously expected to carry the burden of American racial politics on their shoulders. The four black contestants were often asked to pose together for photos, “as well as questioned incessantly about ‘what it felt like to have a chance to become the first black woman to win the crown.’” In the