‘Secrets of Miss America’ explores the pageant’s racist history and what was done to fix it

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Vanessa Williams was crowned the first Black Miss America in 1984. (Photo: A&E)

The Miss America organization has a long and ugly history of racism and diversity, and Mondays Secrets of Miss America explored just how ugly and how ugly it was.

A&E’s new series delves into various secrets and controversies that have transpired in and around America’s longest-running pageant. The latest episode began with a number of interview subjects in this case, former contestants reading a rule from a 1948 Miss America contract which stated: The contestant must be in good health and white.

That deal came during the tenure of Lenora Slaughter, who served as executive director from 1941 to 1967. Author Amy Argetsinger said on the show that Slaughter was a big reason the pageant survived, but she’s also responsible for a pretty toxic legacy that the pageant has struggled to live up to.

The rule was removed in the 1950s, but it wasn’t until 1970 that a black woman won a state title in order to enter the pageant and another decade until a black woman was crowned Miss America.

That person was Vanessa Williams, who was named Miss America 1984 and then renounced her title after photos of her appeared in Penthouse magazine. The next black winners came in 1990 with Debbye Turner, 1991 with Marjorie Vincent and 1994 with Kimberly Aiken. But according to Brittany Lee Lewis, a history teacher and also Miss Delaware 2014, things weren’t quite what they seemed.

I think to outsiders watching the Miss America organization, in the early ’90s, it seems like all the racial woes and issues are gone, Lewis said during Monday’s episode. But the reality is that they have become much more secretive and clandestine, if you will.

When Caressa Cameron became Miss America 2010, she began having trouble with the organization not understanding or willing to help maintain her hair for the many appearances she was booked for. She eventually had to cut most of her and attend events wearing wigs which she had to find and buy for herself.

The story continues

Caressa Cameron was crowned Miss America in 2010. (Photo: A&E)

When you enter an industry focused on beauty, because at the end of the day, we are always a beauty [pageant], we take pride in our appearance and the image we project of ourselves. So not being able to present the best image of myself, I think, was tough,” Cameron told Yahoo Entertainment. I think [the organization] was ill-equipped to handle what she wanted Miss America’s schedule to be, and also what her needs would be in terms of maintaining a certain level of beauty that she had. Then you insert being black on top of that, which is a whole other need. It was just a band, for lack of a better word.

In 2018, Cameron became a member of a task force that was formed to study the lay of the organization’s playing field at all levels. The data they retrieved confirmed what many had already suspected, that a lack of diversity was happening on a large scale at the local level. The statistics, which she said had never been made public before, showed that 90% of their state managers and 87% of judges all identified as white.

Cameron said she received emails from girls across the country locally who were told to wear certain dresses because they were too heavy at the bottom, or to wear a certain type of makeup to make their noses look smaller.

“I knew this was happening, but seeing so many and hearing so many stories, it was like, ‘Wow, this is happening all over the country, not just in Virginia.'”

Brent Adams, vice president of marketing and development for the Miss America organization, said in the docuseries that after these findings, they implemented policies to ensure there was at least one person of color on every jury.

“There’s probably a lot more we could do, but we wanted to at least start somewhere,” he said.

There have been nine black winners in the contest’s history, and Cameron tells Yahoo that while she thinks having rules around judging is “huge,” there’s still a lot to do.

“I think those tentacles also have to extend to the leadership of the board of directors that represents each local and state title, and then also to the Miss America level because it’s very difficult to recruit girls from diverse backgrounds if there’s no one in leadership positions who can meet their needs, who knows where they are to even find them, who would have the ability to connect with them if they were able to try to recruit them and those kinds of things,” she says. “I think that’s where we have the most room to grow, for our leadership to start looking more like America, so that we can then start recruiting more women to hold those titles that also look like the American landscape.”

Secrets of Miss America airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on A&E.

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