"Up Against the Wall Miss America": Women's Liberation and Miss Black America in Atlantic City, 1968 Author(s): Georgia Paige Welch Source: Feminist Formations, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Summer 2015), pp. 70-97 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43860799 Accessed: 22-03-2021 22:24 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Formations This content downloaded from 128.95.104.109 on Mon, 22 Mar 2021 22:24:01 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "Up Against the Wall Miss America": Women's Liberation and Miss Black America in Atlantic City, 1968 Georgia Paige Welch The women's liberation movement's demonstration against the 1968 Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, widely canonized as the first major action of the second-wave radical feminist movement, coincided with an event more often forgotten : the first Miss Black America contest. Women's liberation denounced the oppressive beauty standards of pageants, while, a few blocks away, African American activists and entrepreneurs staged an alternative pageant to champion the beauty of Black women and protest racial exclusion in the Miss America Pageant This article uses the convergence and incongruity of these two political public per- formances to reconsider the dominant story of the women's liberation movement's protestas told by journalists, second- wave feminists, and historians.