Women's Liberation and Miss Black America in Atlantic City, 1968 Author(S): Georgia Paige Welch Source: Feminist Formations, Vol

"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 performances to reconsider the dominant story of the women's liberation movement's protestas told by journalists, second- wave feminists, and historians. Their story, by neglecting the trenchant influence of racial politics and Black activists at play that day, has consolidated the famous protest into a sign of radical feminism's failure to be a multiracial and intersectional political movement. The article argues that it is only through examining the intersection of women's liberation, civil rights, and Black Power that we can fully chart the racism that feminism both confronted and reproduced, and recover the diverse work done by women of color in the name of feminism and antiracism.

Keywords: Black Power / Kennedy, Florynce / Miss America Pageant / Miss Black America contest / National Association for the Advancement of Colored People / women's liberation movement

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 Georgia Paige Welch • 71

Introduction

Outside the 1968 Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Florynce "Flo" Kennedy chained herself to an oversized effigy of Miss America to protest women's "enslavement to ludicrous 'beauty' standards" ("No More Miss America!" 1970, 586). Kennedy was an African American lawyer, feminist, and civil rights activist noted for defending Black Power radicals and instigating inventive political protests. Mere blocks away on that same afternoon, a parade of African American beauty contestants in evening gowns rolled down the Atlantic City boardwalk. They were staging another protest against the Miss America Pageant, in the form of an all-Black beauty contest. Wearing her hair in an untreated "natural," the first ever Miss Black America proclaimed, "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" (Klemesrud 1968). The women's liberation demonstration in which Kennedy took part is enshrined in popular memory as one of the first and most significant actions of the second-wave feminist movement. The mere mention of feminism and beauty pageants is sure to generate a series of associations in most people's minds - whether of unruly women setting bras on fire in a hyperbolic gesture against a harmless beauty pageant, or courageous founders of a mass movement taking a stand against sexist oppression. Kennedy's role as an organizer and demonstrator in the action is all but forgotten despite the fact that she was one of the most prominent Black feminists of her day, and current scholarship shows that she had a foundational influence on the women's liberation movement (Fahs 2001; Randolph 2009). Still fewer people recall that in 1968, a civil rights protest also challenged the beauty standards of the bathing-suit contest cum scholarship pageant. Why are these two quite different responses by African American women to hegemonic ideals of beauty absent from narratives of the women's movement? What do they say about the importance of race in interpreting political critiques of beauty, and in conceiving of beauty as a political strategy? How do we make sense of the contradictions between a protest against a pageant, and a pageant as a protest? In this article, I contend that we can answer these questions, and rectify the shortcomings of our scholarly and popular narratives of women's liberation, by reexamining this famous day through the conjunction of women's liberation and Miss Black America. I begin by recounting the lesser known event of the Miss Black America contest within the historical context of antiracist uses of beauty culture, using archival sources that shed new light on who organized the contest. I then consider how popular, activist, and academic accounts of the women's liberation protest have used the iconic event to encapsulate the meaning of feminism, resulting in distortions and omissions of its full complexity. I argue for understanding the women's liberation protest and Black contest as

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 72 • Feminist Formations 27.2

mutually constitutive rather than fundamentally separate events by tracing the intersections underlying their political influences and media reception in 1968. Following the work of Maxine Leeds Craig (2002), I assess the interpretation that the two actions were incommensurate because white women's liberation' ists, in denouncing all beauty pageants, including Miss Black America, failed to grasp how Black women's participation in a beauty contest could itself constitute a political stand against racism and sexism. I find this interpretation limited, in that it relies upon a problematic archive in which the mass media framed civil rights and feminism as competing social movements, with race and sex oppression as their nonintersecting domains, respectively, and in which select women and organizations serve as representatives of late 1960s radical feminism. I then return to the manifold deployments and transgressions of feminine respectability onstage that day in order to interrupt the consolidation of the women's liberation protest as a sign of the whiteness of radical feminism and its failings. My purpose is to show that a complete intersectional analysis of the racial and sexual politics of beauty in 1968 demands an expanded archive that reframes the boundaries of the event. Through this new framing, we can better account for the convergences and paradoxical consequences of social movements in the making.

Beauty Culture and "Racial Rearticulation"

Since Sarah Banet-Weiser (1999) argued for studying beauty pageants as important sites for shaping the boundaries of national belonging in The Most Beautiful Girl in the World , a productive field has grown around tracing the ways in which pageants throughout the world reflect, consolidate, and, at times, reconfigure norms of race, class, gender, and sexuality for national identity (Ahmed'Ghosh 2003; Cohen et al. 1996; Sangari 2002). Scholars have found that for minority and immigrant groups within the US context, beauty pageants and beauty culture have been a means for countering racist representations, demonstrating suitability as citizens, and expressing community pride (Baldwin 2007; Craig 2002; Lim 2005; Peiss 1998; White and White 1998). Craig (2002, 14; 2006, 170) calls this a process of "racial rearticulation" in which African Americans use cultural symbols and practices to challenge and rework the dominant interpretations of race. Shirley Lim (2005) similarly argues that Asian American women's cultural practices are "a set of transformative social acts" that use women's appearances to make a bid for national inclusion (1). This scholarship shows that when certain features of hair, dress, skin color, and physiognomy are deemed desirable beauty standards for individual women of color, they convey larger social meanings about class, race, and gender. These meanings are negotiated and contested within minority communities, even as they are mounted as an outward "community response" to racist stereotypes and prejudice (6). Beauty can, in fact, be a political strategy that marginalized

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 Georgia Paige Welch • 73

communities and individual women use to remake racial identity and its place within the larger society. Beauty as a means of racial rearticulation cannot be separated from the role of respectability in the Black freedom struggle. Evelyn Higginbotham (1994) argues that African American Baptist women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries combated racism and sexism through a "politics of respectability" (186-88). Several studies use this concept - politics of respectability as a strategy to challenge white supremacy by encouraging individuals to adopt bourgeois morals and manners - to shed light on African American women's lives during the Jim Crow era (Greene 2005; Knupfer 1996; Shaw 1996; Wolcott 2001). Discourses and performances of respectability are fundamentally gendered, primarily addressing women's roles, sexuality, and domesticity. During the 1950s and '60s, the respectability of African American protestors, especially women who appeared "lady-like," in contrast to the image of rabid, segregationist mobs, was one of the civil rights movement's "most effective weapons" (Chap- pell, Hutchinson, and Ward 1999). Jeanne Theohariss The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (2013) shows that Parks's public image of feminine respectability as a quiet, churchgoing, well-dressed, and dignified seamstress made her an effective representative of the Montgomery bus boycott. Christina Greene (2005) emphasizes that respectability during the 1950s through the '70s also referred to styles of political engagement, or a "commitment to middle-class values of civility, persuasion, and neutrality as opposed to militant, confrontational politics" (315). She argues that as formal segregation dissolved by the mid-1960s, the politics of respectability contributed to class divisions in the Black freedom struggle, was seen as inherently conservative, and had lost its purchase on the movement (214-16). The fault lines undermining the politics of respectability during the latter years of the civil rights movement were also apparent in the movement's relationship to beauty pageants in the 1960s. From roughly the 1920s through the '50S, beauty pageants in the United States were racially segregated. African American contests were frequently commercial ventures organized by Black middle-class men and sponsored by Black publications and businesses. The contests were vehicles to promote racial pride and Black enterprise at the same time (Craig 2002; Walker 2007). From World War II until the mid-1960s, Afri- can American women entered predominantly white pageants with the support of civil rights organizations as an expressly political action to integrate beauty culture. Straightened hair, light skin, and middle-class dress were requisite markers of Black racial dignity in this era. The Miss America Pageant, which had explicitly barred nonwhite contestants in the 1930s (Banet-Weiser 1999, 127), represented the highest goal in this campaign (Walker 2007, 166). Because the pageant took the posture of a meritocracy, it was an ideal forum for the civil rights movement to both demand equality and demonstrate racial progress through African American women's individual achievements.

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 74 * Feminist Formations 27.2

This focus on integration shifted in the mid-1960s when the spirit of "Black is beautiful" created an upheaval in the aesthetics of Black womanhood. Natural hair, dark skin, and "African" features were celebrated in defiance of hegemonic, Anglo-centric beauty standards (Craig 2002). The Afro hairstyle emerged as a political transgression of Black respectability, evolved into a powerful symbol of Black pride, and ultimately was commodified as a popular style (ibid.; Mercer 1987; Rooks 1996; Walker 2007). By 1970, all-Black pageants animated by Black- is-beautiful ideals flourished, displacing the integration of historically white pageants as a focal point of the Black freedom movement. The Miss Black America contest was a product of this particular juncture, which questioned respectability's authority in African American beauty and protest culture and manifested new ideals of politicized black womanhood.

The Movement behind Miss Black America

The Miss Black America contest was at once a critical address to the Miss America Pageant and an affirmation of pride in Black beauty and womanhood. The organizers choreographed a newsworthy event by synthesizing two of the most prominent objects of mass-media attention of the 1960s: beauty pageants and political demonstrations. The beauty contest's specifics, which were hastily coordinated with only a dozen contestants, were less important than its message. As one contemporary observer remarked, the event was "set up almost exclusively for the press" (Arkow 1968). The beauty queens rode in a motorcade down the boardwalk and through the city before moving to the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where they took the stage in swimsuit, talent, and evening- gown competitions. The winner, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) member and college coed Saundra Williams, dressed and presented herself much like any white Miss America hopeful. But she also wore her hair "natural," performed an African dance as her featured talent, and explicitly defended Black women as beautiful. In the contest's question-and- answer session, she supported an equitable distribution of housework between the sexes and chastised men for "getting awfully lazy" (Klemesrud 1968, 54). In the following days, her victory portrait appeared prominently in newspapers alongside the new Miss America, the blonde-haired Judith Ford. In the only scholarly examination of the first Miss Black America contest beyond a passing mention or footnote, Craig's Ain't I a Beauty Queen (2002) interprets the pageant as encapsulating a historical pivot between civil rights and Black Power, or "the point at which the trajectories of the separatist and integrationist black movements met and became one" (74). Ironically, in order to compel the Miss America organization to integrate Black participants, the organizers of Miss Black America held a separate, all-Black pageant that would become an annual institution in its own right and inspire a new cadre of similar contests in the Black Power era. When newspapers covered the contest, they

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 Georgia Paige Welch • 75

implied (misleadingly, as we will see) that it was a protest authored by the most prominent civil rights organization in the country, the NAACR Drawing on these reports, Craig concludes that by 1968, "even the NAACP was taking the separatist path" (ibid.). After consulting NAACP records in the Library of Congress, I draw a different conclusion about the facts of the contest's organization and what they can tell us about the status of the Black freedom movement in the late 1960s. Correspondence between officials and members of the NAACP suggests that the organization did not coordinate or even endorse the Miss Black America contest. It emerged instead from activism and entrepreneurship in Philadelphia, with the unauthorized support of a local NAACP official. The muddled story of the NAACP 's role in the protest indicates that we need a revised vocabu- lary for telling the story of Miss Black America's emergence. I emphasize that the contest is not evidence of the wholesale turn of the civil rights movement toward Black nationalism, but indicates instead the way that locally specific campaigns for racial justice comprised a national movement rife with internal conflicts. Following a new wave of work on the Black freedom struggle that dislodges an historical narrative of movement decline that separates and sequences civil rights and Black Power, I turn to the local conditions and people that "populated, shaped, and led" a movement that does not fit the dominant civil rights story (Theoharis 2006, 348). As Tomiko Brown-Nagin's (2012) legal history of the long civil rights movement in Atlanta has amply demonstrated, the national agenda of the NAACP was often at odds with thé priorities and strategies of local activists. In Philadelphia, local campaigns and chapters of the NAACP incubated Black nationalism, radicalism, and direct action to an extent not reflected in the national leadership's vision (Countryman 2006). The NAACP leadership struggled to keep the personal opinions of officials from being mistaken for the organization's authorized platform on issues like the war in Vietnam (Inghram 2006). While tensions between integrationism and separatism were paramount to the formation of an all-Black beauty contest as a political protest against race-based exclusion, the tensions point less to the path of the NAACP as a whole and more to the divergent priorities and approaches to activism harbored in its network of local affiliates. It was the Atlantic City chapter of the NAACP that wanted to break the beauty-queen color line. The local president, Edgar Harris, met with pageant officials to negotiate how the Miss America Pageant could end forty-seven years of white contestants by admitting an African American woman in the 1968 competition. The NAACP national leadership was reluctant to get involved in the matter, but was left with no choice but to respond when the Miss America Pageant president, Adrian Phillips, wrote directly to NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins. Phillips, defensive of the pageant's progress toward integration, offered the civil rights organization a thousand dollars in scholarship funds to encourage "qualified contestants" to enter local and state pageants in the Miss

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 7Ó • Feminist Formations 27.2

America franchise. Wilkins was mildly annoyed at having the matter thrust upon him, complaining in a memo to Henry Moon in the NAACP public- relations department that the issue began in "purely local terms," but now the pageant "seeks to get us involved as a national organization and to place certain responsibilities on our shoulders." Moon advised that the association should "participate" on the condition that the pageant increased its efforts to engage minority communities in local and state feeder contests.1 For Black residents of Atlantic City, the pageant was a manifestation of local conditions of segregation and Black invisibility. Post-World War II Atlan- tic City built its reputation as "America's playground," where white tourists came to "feel on top of the world" while the resident African American population provided the labor to keep it running (Simon 2006, 7). Spaces of leisure and entertainment, like the beachfront böardwalk, became battlegrounds for integration during the civil rights movement. Atlantic City's NAACP chapter used the threat of a boycott to successfully pressure local utility companies and hotels to sponsor the first "integrated floats" in the 1966 Miss America pre-pageant boardwalk parade ("Demand Integrated Floats" 1966). In 1967, the more militant Afro American Unity Movement pressed the city to address chronic problems in the Black community, such as police brutality and the lack of services to Black residential areas. Capitalizing on city officials' fear that recent urban riots might spread to the tourist town, they used a threat against the pageant as leverage: "If the city fathers don't do what they promised, then maybe they should take the Miss America Pageant elsewhere" (Johnson 1967; "Negroes Accuse Police" 1967). When the Miss America Pageant came to town, African Americans experienced it as a segregated event that used their hometown as a site for reproducing national white supremacy. For the national NAACP, the Miss America Pageant held less immediate, material significance. Although integrating beauty pageants had been part of the front lines of the civil rights movement for decades - the NAACP's public- relations department had even proposed entering "talented Negro girls" in the Miss America Pageant following World War II2 - by 1968 the organization was apathetic. This may have been because the Black freedom movement at large was growing frustrated with the disconnect between gestures of formal integration and the persistence of inequality in everyday life, compounded by the fact that the pageant was a feminine, mass-culture, commodified spectacle. Moon wrote to Wilkins: "We do not regard the 'Miss America' stunt as an important issue but it does have certain image and publicity value which, we think, we should take advantage of."3 In their eyes, the pageant was trivial compared to purportedly more serious politics. Despite the lack of shared enthusiasm, both the Atlantic City and national NAACP shared the same agenda of integration achieved by degrees through ongoing pressure and negotiation. With the New York headquarters' acquiescence, the Atlantic City chapter and pageant officials moved forward with a joint press release. The resulting

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 Georgia Paige Welch • 77

newspaper items told of a successful, if minor step toward integration. At the urging of the esteemed NAACP, the Miss America Pageant was overcoming its "lily white" past by adding an African American reverend to its board of direc- tors and recruiting "Negro beauties" into the pageant pipeline ("Miss America Names Negro"; "Move to Get Negroes"; "Negro Girls Sought" [all 1968]). Until more African American women rose through the pageanťs ranks, the issue seemed resolved for the time being. Two weeks later, the newspapers announced a fresh and decidedly more confrontational assault on the Miss America Pageant. Articles like "Contest Slated to Select Miss Black America" and "Negroes Plan Show to Rival Con- test for Miss America" reported that an NAACP official, Phillip Savage, was protesting the white pageant by holding the first Miss Black America contest on the very same day in Atlantic City. Savage told the Associated Press, "[w]e want to be in Atlantic City at the same time the hypocritical Miss America contest is being held. Theirs will be lily white and ours will be black" ("ist 'Miss Black America'" 1968). Savage's connection with the NAACP went a long way in generating press coverage, lending legitimacy, and framing the contest as a civil rights protest. The mere mention of the NAACP in newspaper articles led readers to assume that the organization held full responsibility for the contest; one paper labeled the contest "NAACP Sponsored" ("ist 'Miss Black America' "). In this context, the Miss Black America contest seemed like an intensification of the earlier round of pressure on the Miss America Pageant to integrate. The NAACP appeared to be abandoning its hallmark brand of political civility for a direct action against Miss America. In reality, the Miss Black America contest was initiated in Philadelphia without sponsorship by the NAACP. It was co-organized by J. Morris Anderson, an entrepreneur (who presides over the Miss Black America organization to this day), and Savage, the NAACP's New York-Pennsylvania-Delaware tri-state director. In 1965, Savage had proposed a boycott of the Miss America Pageant's national and local sponsors if African American women were not admitted, announcing that "[i]t is time for Miss America to be Miss America and not Miss White America" ("'No Colored, No Pageant,' Warns Savage" 1965). In support- ing Miss Black America he operated independently of the NAACP, without the involvement of any of its branches, even Atlantic City. National/local rifts in the NAACP were again at play. In Philadelphia, Black Power and intra-racial organizing had largely displaced the liberal civil rights agenda by the late 1960s, thus it is not surprising that a pageant with Black nationalist leanings would have roots in that city (Countryman 2006). Meanwhile, Wilkins was known for taking a hard line against Black Power (and, as we have seen, was not inclined to regard beauty pageants as a political issue). After seeing the news coverage, a member and former executive secretary of the Columbus, Ohio, NAACP branch wrote to Wilkins to point out the irony of the NAACP promoting a "segregated" contest. In response to letters assuming that it had sponsored the

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 78 • Feminist Formations 27.2

contest, the organization's headquarters in New York responded that it had "no official connection" to Miss Black America and referred inquiries to Anderson.4 Miss Black America, like African American beauty contests of an earlier era, was a commercial as much as a political venture. Anderson, to illustrate the principled origins of the contest, has long told a story in which his young daughters, innocent of the racist legacy of the pageant, dreamt of becoming Miss America when they grew up ("Before There Was" 2014). But Anderson was also capitalizing on the success of beauty pageants, which had multiplied into a host of national and international pageants, including pageants for teenagers and children, all vying for television audiences and commercial sponsors. Under the aegis of a protest, Anderson also launched a successful business: by 1969, Miss Black America would be a lavish, televised event at New York City's Madison Square Garden featuring Stevie Wonder and the Jackson 5. The efforts coming from Atlantic City and Philadelphia illustrate two very different approaches to the same target, even as they became melded as a single affair in the public imagination. Inadvertently, the NAACP became linked with a political tactic that the organization never would have pursued and over an issue that it believed was not worth its energy in the first place. The Atlantic City NAACP branch pressured the pageant to move one step closer toward including Black women as competitors for the Miss America title, but it was the Philadelphia organizers, and the Black women who joined the Miss Black America contest, who seized the crown. The combination of these approaches helps us to understand how the performance of Miss Black America - as a protest, as well as a beauty pageant - enacted and breached particular modes of African American respectability.

Image Memory of the Women's Liberation Movement's Miss America Pageant Protest

The women's liberation movement's protest proposed a clash between political militancy and the debutante-ball style of femininity on offer at the Miss America Pageant. In 1968, the women's liberation group New York Radical Women (NYRW) conceived of the action and issued a tract titled "No More Miss America!" condemning the pageant for being not only sexist, but racist, ageist, capitalist, and pro-war. About eighty women bused from New York City to Convention Hall in Atlantic City (the pageant's longstanding venue), being met there by other groups from Florida, New Jersey, Iowa, Ohio, Washington, D.C., Detroit, and Boston (Curtis 1968a; Echols 1989, 93; Ezekiel 2002, 88). They proceeded to picket and perform skits in front of a gathering throng of spectators. They sang protest songs as they marched, changing the lyrics of "We Shall Not Be Moved" - an African American spiritual used in the civil rights and labor movements - to "We Shall Not Be Used," and called for a boycott of the pageant's sponsors. One of the main attractions was a piece of street

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 Georgia Paige Welch ♦ 79

theater of a "cattle auction" in which women, including Kennedy, were chained to a giant puppet of Miss America while another protester performed the part of an auctioneer. Hecklers, kept back by police barricades, called the protest tors communists, lesbians, and ugly. The night culminated in several women entering Convention Hall to unfurl a banner and shout "Women's liberation!" as the outgoing Miss America delivered her farewell speech on live television. Virtually unknown before the demonstration, the movement gained immediate notoriety through a cascade of news items and opinion pieces across the nation. As historian Estelle B. Freedman (2002, 214) put it, women's liberationists had "scored their first publicity coup."5 Recollections of the women's liberation protest against the Miss America Pageant have long been a battleground for the meaning and relevance of feminism as a social movement. In Feeling Women's Liberation , Victoria Hesford (2013) uses the term image memory to capture how a symbolic figure is produced through processes of mass-mediated representation, and how over time accrues particular historical meanings about the movement it is meant to signify. An image memory emerges through a process of omission and distortion that creates a coherent story out of the "complex, contradictory, heterogeneous mess of any moment or era" (12). For over forty years, the Miss America Pageant protest, as perhaps the most famous instance of second-wave feminist protest in US culture, has provided a central image memory for characterizing the women's liberation movement. The central figure in the image memory of the movement's protest is of the "bra-burner," characterized as a woman protester who is unjustifiably outraged by beauty standards. As has been repeated innumerable times, no bras were actually burned on the boardwalk in Atlantic City; instead, women tossed items like bras, high heels, eyelash curlers, and women's magazines into what they called a "freedom trashcan" rather than setting them aflame. But the titil- lating alliteration caught on in the media and has dogged the movement ever since (Van Gelder 1992). In her analysis of media discourses about feminism and the Miss America Pageant, communications scholar Bonnie J. Dow (2003, 129) says that "bra burning, it was implied, was the desperate bid for attention by neurotic, unattractive women." Race and class were factors in selling this interpretation - after all, what legitimate grievance could white middle-class women possibly have? This image memory's rhetorical force came from severely constricting the range of women's liberation's heterogeneous political analysis, motivations, and constituents - all of which were far from congealed into a singular movement in 1968. Feminists responded in articles, memoirs, and interviews by celebrating the protest as an historic, radical turning point in the development of feminism. White, New York-based women have been the face of this message, with early NYRW member and protest organizer Robin Morgan as perhaps its foremost representative. Morgan, a well-known writer and activist, republished "No

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 8o • Feminist Formations 27.2

More Miss America!" in her seminal 1970 anthology Sisterhood Is Powerful and recounted the protest in no less than three memoirs (1977, 1992, 2001) and in a 2013 episode of the PBS documentary series MAKERS : Women Who Make America . But the origin story she and others created tends to remain stuck on correcting the factual inaccuracy of bra-burning in the perennial hope of overcoming radical feminism's trivialization once and for all. National Public Radio's fortieth-year commemoration, "Pageant Protest Sparked Bra-Burning Myth," is a case in point (Greenfieldboyce 2008). Even in a revisionist narrative, bra-burning, along with its race and class significations, remains the prevailing image memory of women's liberation. The legacy of women's liberation is not the only matter at stake in the use of the protest's history; the image memory circumscribes both the substance and authorship of feminist analyses of beauty contests. In 2013, the New York Times conjured up "the famous bra-burning demonstrations" as the point of departure for an online debate forum on the Miss America Pageant. Scholars, authors, and pageant participants responded in short essays to the prompt, "In 1968, feminists gathered in Atlantic City to protest the Miss America Pageant, calling it racist and sexist. Is this beauty contest bad for women?" ("There She Is, Miss America"). Responses to the sexism question arrayed along a spectrum, beginning with the outright denunciation of beauty pageants reminiscent of 1968 and extending to the presumably more modern interpretation that the pageant can be a platform for feminism and diversity (Martin 2013; Redd 2013). The Miss America Pageant has successfully cannibalized feminist and antiracist critiques of the contest through a discourse of liberal individualism in which the pageant itself is a vehicle for feminism and racial equality because women are exercising personal agency as contestants (Dow 2003, 129). One scholar in the Times forum argued that the pageant was "beneficial for women of color" because it had, over the years, crowned increasing numbers of women of color who used it as a springboard for successful careers (Watson 2013). The debate firmly aligned women of color with the pageant as an empowering institution for minority women, while the specter of Atlantic City protestors was associated with an overly extreme critical stance. The New York Times rendered feminism of the late 1960s as, at best, an outmoded response that cannot grasp the empowering possibilities of pageantry, and, at worst, a hypocritical stumbling block to women overcoming past oppression. Would this interpretation be different if Miss Black America were invoked as the reference point for this debate? How might it be different if African American women picketing in chains were the memorialized figures of the women's liberation movement's protest instead of bra-burners? The movement's protest often appears as a plagued landmark in academic literature on beauty. As Lim (2005, 123) observes, "analyzing beauty pageants has been especially tricky because the Second wave' of feminism was willed into being through concerted opposition to the 1968 Miss America Pageant." For

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 Georgia Paige Welch • 8i

her, this opposition leaves little room for understanding why and how minority communities turned to beauty pageants as a means for negotiating their position in the nation-state. Kathy Lee Peiss (1998) argues that the feminist criticism originating in the 1960s misses how women experience agency and pleasure in beauty culture, particularly African American women, who found opportune ties for entrepreneurship and community-building in the beauty cultures and industries they helped create during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (4-5). Banet-Weiser (1999) takes issue with the very premise of sub- jectivity underlying "the feminist argument that the Miss America Pageant objectified and alienated women" (10); instead, she is interested in how the practices of beauty pageants produce rather than repress preexisting, racialized, and gendered subjects. Craig (2002) sees the women's liberation protest, in its tensions with the Miss Black America contest, as an instructive illustration of African American women's "intersectional disempowerment" (Kimberlé Crenshaw, qtd. in Craig, 5) and a productive starting point for investigating Black women's historical relationships to beauty pageants. While these critiques have made for rich investigations of beauty and race, I am dissatisfied with how heavily they rely upon the image memory of the protest. Without closer historical inspection, they assume that women's liberation's attack on the Miss America Pageant was reductive and racially exclusive. Reopening the protest to include what and who were rendered extraneous in the consolidation of its image memory suggests that racial politics were deeply implicated in the formation of beauty as a feminist issue. Miss Black America also challenged beauty standards; the women's liberation protest made analo- gies to racism and adopted tactics from the Black freedom struggle; and women of color, although in limited numbers, had a significant role in the women's liberation protest.6 1 am interested in historicizing the production of women's liberation as a movement by and for white women, which allows us to both question how beauty culture became a wedge issue in feminism - evident in the New York Times and feminist scholarship - and think through the complex ways that different women are positioned in relation to beauty and respectability.

Florynce Kennedy's Intersectional Politics

Given this image memory, it is surprising to learn that Kennedy was a core organizer of the women's liberation protest. Although she is virtually never associated with the Miss America Pageant action, Kennedy recalled in an interview many years later, "I was the force of that."7 Morgan's archived papers documenting the protest's organizing, including correspondence, brainstorm- ing notes, drafts of "No More Miss America!," to-do lists, and lists of contacts, contain many references to Kennedy's involvement. Popular discussions of feminism, in a flawed logic that perpetuates the pageant's own historic exclusion of women of color, assume that only the women hailed by the pageant's beauty

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 82 • Feminist Formations 27.2

standards - white middle-class women - would find protesting the pageant to be a relevant political act. A closer look at Kennedy's politics and influence on the women's movement, however, makes visible a larger scope of investments and motivations that women brought to the protest. Kennedy's politics were intersectional in that she insisted that race, sex, and class oppression flow from the same sources and must be simultaneously confronted by radical activism. Kennedy was a prolific activist throughout the 1960s, working in civil rights, consumer rights, Black Power, and feminist movements. Besides her practice as a lawyer, she was a media personality who wrote newspaper columns and hosted television and radio shows. She had a foundational influence on organizations ranging from the National Organiza- tion for Women (NOW), to the National Black Feminist Organization, to Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (a sex-workers' rights organization). Kennedy was something of an independent operator and provocateur on the political scene, always resistant to being hemmed in by the ideological or identitarian con- straints of political groups. She was remarkably committed to and instrumental in forging links among movements. For instance, Kennedy brought white radical feminists to Black Power meetings, pressured NOW to take more radical stances on Black liberation and the Vietnam War, and challenged Black radicals to support liberalizing abortion laws. She grew increasingly famous as a feminist during the 1970s, working the lecture circuit, often alongside Gloria Steinem. As Sherie M. Randolph (2009) has argued, Kennedy's work was not simply an exception within a feminist movement forged predominantly by white women; rather, she "help[ed] educate a generation of young women about feminism in particular and radical political organizing more generally" (223). Kennedy believed that clothes were political. From the courtroom to the streets, she wrestled with how to "package" herself and her message (1976, 6-1 1). She rejected the civil rights ethos of using respectability to earn citizenship. Kennedy recalled a formative moment, when police would not let her cross a barricade to reach her own home: "As nicely and conservatively as I was dressed, I was still just another nigger" (Kennedy, qtd. in Burstein 1975). She also refused to comply with politically correct dress codes imposed by the anti-establishment Left; for instance, she irked radical feminists and union women by wearing a chiffon dress and mink jacket to an event instead of "dressing down" to show class solidarity or dressing androgynously to show resistance to patriarchy. From the late 1960s through the '70s, Kennedy purposefully wore outrageous outfits, cursed, and crafted an eccentric public image; she was usually found wearing a man's cap or cowboy hat over an Afro, lots of large jewelry, false eyelashes, and political T-shirts. Her self-presentation was her own distinctive brand of political theater, which resisted categorization and reinforced her persona as a radical in the largest, most multivalent sense. The Miss America Pageant was an ideal target for Kennedy, who frequently attacked racism and sexism perpetuated by the media, corporations,

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 Georgia Paige Welch • 83

and prevailing norms of propriety. In her fifties at the time, she was older and more politically experienced than Morgan and most of the other women in NYRW. Although not a regular member, she mentored and collaborated with the group to plan the Atlantic City action. She drew from her political network of activists and journalists to provide NYRW with a list of dozens of people in progressive media and political organizations who might cover or attend the protest. Morgan's organizing notes suggest that Kennedy advised NYRW about legal issues, such as how to obtain a permit for demonstrating and how to handle arrests. Morgan, a former child actress with a talent for piquing media interest with clever sound bites, became the main voice of the protest; yet, she always highlighted in her interviews and correspondence Kennedy's role as co-organizer or "advisory sponsor" (Lyons 1968).8 This move capitalized on Kennedy's celeb- rity as Black militant H. Rap Brown's lawyer and lent more radical credibility to women's liberation. She was a political resource, but also a vital link for the burgeoning movement's ambition to build an antiracist, interracial movement. And the protest itself, although generally attributed to white radical feminists, was ultimately imbued with Kennedy's activist priorities and style.

Intersections between Pageants and Protests

I regard the intersection between Miss Black America and the women's liberation movement in 1968 not as happenstance, but as an historically produced convergence. While each event is rich enough to warrant its own analysis, they can be fully understood only in their conjunction. I trace three areas of overlap in particular - the shared conditions of their emergence, political organization, and audience reception - in order to fully interpret what these meant for political public performances of beauty, gender, and race politics in the late 1960s. First, when the civil rights and women's liberation movements both decided that the Miss America Pageant was a meaningful target of protest, they made this calculation within a shared cultural climate in which the pageant was increasingly vulnerable to criticism. The height of the pageant's popularity over the course of the 1960s also came into scrutiny. It was a live television event, the highest-rated show of the year five times during the 1960s (Nielsen Media Research 2007). Yet, the pageant and the women in it were frequently mocked for being corny, outdated, and phony. A long-form piece in the New York Times titled "What Miss America Is Made Of' is a good example (Canaday 1965, 124); it proposed that Miss America was "only a girl-like product synthesized from flesh-like plastic and marketed with slight annual changes in packaging." Even the pageant's own chairman and executive producer concurred it was "pure American corn" (Philips 1964). Musings over the professionalization of the competition, the uniformity of the contestants (down to their Vaseline-coated teeth), and the commercial interests at stake in the pageant were staples of

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 84 • Feminist Formations 27.2

annual media coverage. Liberal-leaning commentators viewed the pageant as clinging hopelessly to a bygone era, "a perfect glimpse back to 1938" (Alexander 1968). Bert Parks had serenaded the winner with the same tune, "There she is, Miss America! There she is, your ideal," since 1955. Or, they remarked on the double standard inherent in women winning academic scholarships based on their appeal in a bathing suit (Goodrich 1965). The popular derision directed at Miss America was rarely self-consciously political, but it did reflect a growing anxiety about what values, particularly around race and sex, the national "ideal" represented. This anxiety was nothing new; it was simply the latest instantiation of the pageanťs struggle to strike the right chord between virtue and exhibitionism, commerce and civic-mindedness, sexual provocation and chaste innocence. The pageant - the invention of which was itself a rejoinder to suffrage, the "new woman," and the expanding role of women in public life (Hamlin 2004) - faced opposition during the 1920s and 30s from women's clubs, local businesses, and religious organizations over concerns that the pageant was morally base and exploited young women (Banet-Weiser 1999, 37). To overcome the pageant's reputation as a bawdy spectacle, organizers instituted reforms to give it an image of middle-class respectability: chaperones, strict codes of behavior, a rule specifying that contestants be "of the white race," the talent competition, and college scholarships helped ensure that Miss America represented a "certain class of girl" (38-40). During the 1950s and early '60s the pageant disproportionately crowned women from the South, in effect legitimating and providing a platform for segregationist America. Southern Miss Americas were a palatable public face for Jim Crow (in contrast to the angry, white aggressors against civil rights activists in the news) and a reminder of "what was at stake in the battle over desegregation: the possibility of interracial sex" (Roberts 2013). Thus, America's ideal woman had been carefully constructed over the decades to embody the social relations of white supremacy, middle-class superiority, and patriarchy. The popular discourse around Miss America in the 1960s was ideological, but it was also diffused - a defanged, feminized proxy for the contentions sur- rounding race, war, sex, and class that marked the decade. This discourse was debating more than the status or role of women, yet gender - in the form of feminine smiles, hair color, hemlines, and calculated answers to judges - was its primary idiom. Protestors in 1968 intensified this conversation and elevated it to an outright political confrontation with the pageant. NYRW's manifesto owed much to this cultural discourse (the group's emphasis on uniformity, blandness, superficially, and commodification were its direct echoes), and the Miss Black America organizers trafficked in its key symbols (smiles, evening gowns, bathing suits, and parades). Popular culture, in tandem with decades of civil rights activism, had created an opening for these protests and primed public consciousness to register them.

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 Georgia Paige Welch • 85

The second critical intersection lies in the collective political landscape of the late 1960s. Women's liberation and the Miss Black America organizers and contestants were drawing from an available cache of signs, tactics, and ideolo- gies to make political analyses and put them into action. Van Gosse (2006, 280) argues that the New Left constituted a "movement of movements," a "collective, pluralist" set of struggles bound by an "overriding cause." In the early 1960s, this common locus resided in the struggle for racial justice, but migrated by the end of the decade to opposition against the Vietnam War. Vietnam served as a major landmark for the New Left, representing a dividing line between radicals and liberals. At the same time, Black Power was rapidly flourishing across the country and attracting media attention with high-profile leaders. While established civil rights organizations were in decline, Black Power's emphasis on self-determination and -defense represented the vanguard of the movement for Black radicals. Both protests bear the mark of these prevailing late-'6os paradigms. Strategically and ideologically they were indebted to the civil rights movement, while embracing the imperatives of Black Power and using positions on the war as a litmus test for radicalism or patriotism. Even though the action in Atlantic City would come to be remembered as distinctively "radical feminist," the women protesting Miss America recycled analyses, forms of protest, and images from the civil rights movement. NYRW accused the Miss America Pageant of "Racism with Roses" because it never had a Black or other racial minority finalist - a criticism nearly identical to that sustained and popularized by the civil rights movement since mid-century. It was not only that racism made it onto their list of Miss America's crimes; the new movement relied heavily upon an analogy with race oppression, particularly Black slavery, to make the claim that women, like African Americans, were oppressed as a group. A Washington, D.C., women's liberation group proclaimed that "Slavery Exists!" on its flier for the protest,9 while "No More Miss America!" repeatedly used the verb to enslave . The auction skit with women in chains mingled associations with cattle at county fairs and human slaves being auctioned. For a virtually unknown movement that was competing for recognition in the mass media, civil rights provided an established, familiar lexicon for making its case. Although women's liberation used the civil rights tradition as a mooring, it also presented the movement as radical by appropriating from and claiming solidarity with the Black Power and antiwar movements. Particularly in New York City, where the protest incubated, significant factions in the new women's and consciousness-raising groups were preoccupied with, in the jargon of the day, being solidly on the "radical" and "revolutionary" end of the leftist spectrum rather than the "moderate" or "reformist" end. Thus, they were hesitant to embrace the term feminist (which, during the 1960s, was associated with a bourgeois, reformist, obsolete suffrage movement) and adopted women's liberation instead, with its anticolonial, revolutionary connotations (Echols 1989, 51-101).

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 86 • Feminist Formations 27.2

In keeping with the Black Power imperative to organize around one's "own oppression," the anti-pageant demonstration was advertised as a "Women Only" event (Morgan 1977, 63-64).10 The NYRW's press release warned that men were barred from participation and only female reporters and police officers would be recognized. "The Ten Points" of protest in "No More Miss America!" was a direct reference to the Black Panthers' 1966 "Ten-Point Program." "Up Against the Wall Miss America," a phrase that appeared on posters and as the title of a documentary film about the protest, was a revolutionary slogan derived from a poem by Amiri Baraka (1991), a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and advocate of armed revolution. Women's liberation called for abolishing the pageant, following a trend in Black Power demanding the unequivocal end to various forms of oppression in lieu of campaigns to modify existing institutions. Women's liberation was decidedly antiwar, and it sampled freely from the antiwar movement. NYRW condemned Miss America's tour to entertain the troops in Vietnam. The freedom trashcan was meant to emulate flag- or draft card-burning. With the violent clashes at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago still fresh in the media, women's liberation used the same irrever- ent, theatrical tactics as the antiwar Yippees: the Yippees nominated a live pig for president in Chicago; women's liberation brought a sheep adorned with a pageant sash to Atlantic City. By marshaling these forms of political engagement, the movement was reworking gestures associated with dissident manhood in the antiwar movement to signal a refusal of both American femininity and foreign policy. In essence, the movement was claiming that the figure of the all-American beauty queen was as politically significant as the male military- eligible citizen - both lightning rods of contentions over the war. The Miss Black America contest also bore the influence of Black Power and cultural nationalism. The very form of an all-Black pageant, rather than redoubling negotiations with the Miss America franchise to integrate or even holding an alternative pageant open to all races, spoke to the exhaustion of negotiating with an unyielding white power structure. The contest was con- sistent with the Black Power impulse to foster African American-controlled institutions. In Miss Black America Williams's words (and here it is difficult to determine where the intentions of the organizers end and the agency of the judges and contestants begins), the purpose of the pageant was not to demonstrate African American worthiness for full national belonging by meeting the Anglo-centric beauty standards of the Miss America Pageant, but rather it was to celebrate Black beauty and culture on their own terms, claiming that they were, in fact, representative of the nation. The Black Power strain coexisted with a more conservative politics of integration, respectability, and national loyalty associated with the civil rights movement. Headlines like "Along with Miss America, There's Now Miss Black America" and "ist Miss Black America Pageant to Be Staged" invoked a progress narrative associated with integration, intimating that the contest was another

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 Georgia Paige Welch • 87

"first" toward racial equality. Newspapers suggested the first Miss Black America was an acceptable substitute for the first Black Miss America. The contest's affili- ation with the NAACP also attenuated the potential for Miss Black America to be viewed as a radical intervention. In mid-1968, the NAACP still prohibited its officials from participating in the antiwar movement. Over the duration of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, Wilkins supported US policy in Vietnam and celebrated African Americans' participation in the nation's first integrated war (Inghram 2006). Under the assumption that the NAACP supported Miss Black America, it was easy to read the contest not as Black nationalism, but simply as American nationalism, a patriotic display akin to the Miss America Pageant. Furthermore, the contest appeared aspirational and assimilative by largely mimicking the style of the Miss America Pageant: Williams wore a white evening gown with matching gloves, jeweled earrings, and a crown that was nearly identical to Ford's. Her hair was a short, understated "natural," which she claimed to wear as personal preference rather than as political statement. Williams more closely resembled the respectable civil rights protestor in her church attire than the female Black militant in an Afro and leather jacket - an image that would be popularized by Kathleen Cleaver and Angela Davis, among others. She represented a feminine, patriotic respectability that, while palatable to the New York Times , was dismissed by radicals of the New Left. The third intersection that warrants framing these two protests together lies in the mediated exchanges that took place among the organizers. News- paper clippings from Morgan's archives suggest that she followed the news coverage, beginning in mid-August, of the NAACP's criticism of the pageant corporation ("Negro Girls Sought" 1968). Announcements for the Miss Black America contest, which came out just over a week before the event, appeared in newspapers with large circulations, including the New York Times and Los Angeles Times ("Negroes Plan Show" 1968; "Contest Slated" 1968). This means that, in all likelihood, Morgan was aware of the civil rights criticism of Miss America and the alternative pageant. Likewise, it is probable that at least some of the organizers, judges, and contestants of Miss Black America heard that women would be demonstrating outside Convention Hall. Morgan generated a significant amount of media attention in early September by sending out "No More Miss America!" and giving interviews. The catchy prose of NYRW's tract and potential spectacle of a clash between beauty queens and women protesters proved irresistible to the media. Morgan's story was published in the Wall Street Journal (Tai 1968), Guardian ("Miss America Is a Fink!" 1968), and in Associ- ated Press articles throughout the nation.11 Given the widespread dissemination of their plans, these two groups of protestors may have anticipated each other, and newspaper readers were primed for two provocative diversions from the hopelessly rote Miss America Pageant. Another exchange, also facilitated by newspapers, occurred between the women's liberation movement and the African American contest as the events

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 88 • Feminist Formations 27.2

unfolded from Saturday afternoon into the wee hours of Sunday morning. When questioned by a New York Times reporter about her impression of the nearby women's liberation protest, Williams reportedly "looked bored" and disassociated herself from the women's cause. Implying that the actions had no bearing on each other and no resonance for her personally, she said that "[t]hey are expressing freedom I guess. To each his own" (Klemesrud 1968). Comments from the boardwalk demonstrators were likewise dismissive of the Miss Black America contest. To the same newspaper, Morgan denounced outright the Black pageant, but clumsily tried to clarify that her intent was radical rather than racist: "We deplore Miss Black America as much as Miss White America, but we understand the black issue involved" (Curtis 1968a). Bonnie Allen, described as a "negro housewife from the Bronx," seemed ambivalent about the alternative pageant and her own choice to participate in women's liberation with a predominantly white group of protestors. She told the Times that "Pm for beauty contests, but then again maybe Pm against them. I think black people have a right to protest" (ibid.). The Times also prodded Ford for a response to the events, and in proper Miss America fashion, she dodged making any substantive comment on events she found "controversial" (Curtis 1968b). For the protestors, beauty contestants, newspaper reporters and their readers, and audiences, bra-burners on the boardwalk, black beauties, and the "queen of the trampoline" (Forďs featured talent that night) were all facets of the same episode, meaningful only in their entanglement.

Framing Women's Liberation

We must take the quotes from Morgan, Williams, and Allen - as compelling as they are - not as self-evident utterances that reveal the meaning of the protests and their relationship to each other, but as props in a discursive framing used by the tatemóos print media. Consider the layout of the New York Times s coverage. Immediately following the pageant, a photo of Ford, with a brief article about her crowning, ran in the newspaper's women's pages, the "Food, Fashions, Family, Furnishings" section ("Illinois Girl" 1968). This announcement was an insert within a larger article covering the women's liberation protest, "Miss America Pageant Is Picketed by 100 Women" (Curtis 1968a). The article explained the quarrel that the "women pickets" had with "enslavement" to "ludicrous beauty standards"; it also had an extended description of the Miss Black America contest, including the reactions from Morgan and Allen. Thus, Ford's smiling face was literally surrounded by the women's liberation controversy. On the following day, a longer piece on Ford ran side by side with one on Williams, again in the women's pages; both featured large photographs of the women wearing their crowns, sashes, and scepters. Although the two articles spanning the page were separate, written by different reporters, they were conjoined by a single headline: "Along with Miss America, There's Now Miss Black America" (Curtis

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 Georgia Paige Welch • 89

1968b; Klemesrud 1968). From within their respective news items, each beauty queen commented on her racial Other and the women's liberation protestors. The intertextuality of the two pairs of articles generated a triangulation and series of oppositions between the pageants and the social movements that put Miss Black America and women's liberation at odds, a schema that other publications deployed as well. Life magazine reported the story through the paradigm of a three-way competition with the headline, "The Winner, a Rival in Black and Some Ribroast Ribbing" (1968). The line referred, respectively, to three photographs laid out on the page: a tearful Ford receiving her sash; Williams smiling with the runners-up to Miss Black America; and a women's liberation protestor holding a sign as a male observer looked on ("A New Way" 1968). Other publications also used this triangulation, demonstrating that it was a compelling way for editors and readers to make sense of the contradictions manifesting in this variegated politicization of beauty pageants (Akrow 1968; "Miss America Gets Some Competition" 1968). The cumulative effect in the New York Times and elsewhere was a grand catfight in which women's liberation was the irascible instigator. Instead of presenting a unified front against all women's oppression, the protestors came off as hecklers of other (beautiful, feminine, respectable) women. In a media landscape saturated with political claims and performances of rebellion, civil rights and feminism competed for recognition. The movements were presented as mutually exclusive, even inimical to each other's aims. Given the impossibility of an intersectional political identity, Black women had to choose sides. Allen could only protest with the feminists by turning her back on civil rights; to stand for Black liberation, Williams embraced a gender politics that feminists wanted to abolish. This framing placed both Black feminists and all antiracist feminists in an untenable, invisible position. As historical source material, these articles tell us less about the actual dynamics between the protests and pageants and more about the history of representations of the US women's movement in mass media. When the media, reporters, and readers grappled with what Hesford (2013) calls the "upsetting eventfulness" of women's liberation, they were waging a larger cultural struggle over normative femininity and women's roles. As scholarship on feminism and the mass media has demonstrated, the media used familiar values, framings, and archetypes to build a consensus about the meaning of the movement, and as a result largely maligned radicalism and circumscribed the feminist agenda to equality of the sexes (ibid.; Bradley 2003; Mendes 2001). The coverage of the women's liberation protest fits this pattern. The New York Times presented the women's liberationists through particular tropes that would become mainstays of feminism in the media; for example, Morgan fit the mold of an angry radical who took herself too seriously by comparing the pageant protest to the recent Democratic National Convention demonstrations. In another anecdote that made the protesters seem absurdly strident, a woman was described as shouting

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 90 • Feminist Formations 27.2

at her own grandmother for talking to men. Allen was depicted as a befuddled lady protester who seemed clueless about the politics she was there to support. Kennedy was nowhere to be found in any of the coverage. This was a glaring omission given that the women's liberation protest was a manifestation of her intersectional, media-savvy, provocative activism; it was also surprising considering that the Times had already profiled Kennedy and her protest tactics three times during the summer of 1968 (Bender; Hammel; "Pickets Assail Times" [all 1968]). Kennedy was adept exactly where Morgan and Allen appeared to fail: by making concise and convincing arguments against beauty standards without subsuming race to sex or vice versa. The exclusion of Kennedy, her political perspective, and her mutual association with Black Power and feminism allowed the media to effectively segregate Black activism from feminism, and racism from sexism.

Welcome to the Cattle Auction

Up A gainst the Wall Miss America , a short documentary made in 1968 by a collective of activist filmmakers, prominently features Kennedy and offers visual details that complicate the New York Times's portrayal. The Newsreel Film Collective, based in New York City, makes short documentaries with the express purpose of educating audiences about "events and issues which were being distorted or ignored by the mass media" (Third World Newsreel n.d.).12 The eight-minute black-and-white film is a montage of footage of the protest, culminating in the disruption inside Convention Hall. It shows Kennedy and other protestors boarding buses bound for Atlantic City, singing and picketing with signs, interacting with onlookers across police barricades, and perform- ing a skit that auctions off the Miss America marionette. The film translates the women's liberation commentary on Miss America into an experimental documentary, presenting the radical critique of war, capitalism, and patriarchy by assembling footage of Atlantic City tourists and attractions, the contestants participating in the pageant, and Miss America commodities like dolls and books being sold along the boardwalk. These images are accompanied by audios of news reports about casualties in Vietnam and secessionist movements in Africa and a commentator discussing the radical consequences of women refusing to serve men as wives and mothers. The documentary shows the cattle-auction skit, which demonstrates the nuance of performative politics in 1968. Kennedy wore her signature attire to the protest, dressed from head to toe in all-white slacks, turtleneck, and jacket, large peace-symbol earrings and necklaces, and a nautical cap with a visor. On the boardwalk, NYRW member Peggy Dobbins rattled off in an auctioneer's voice, "Yessiree boys, step right up, how much am I offered for this number one piece of prime American property? She sings in the kitchen, hums at the typewriter, purrs in bed! . . . You can use her to push your products, push your

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 Georgia Paige Welch • 91

politics, or push your war!" The camera slowly panned up Dobbin's outfit to reveal a man's dark, three-piece suit, shoes, and hat. One protestor circled the boardwalk with a sign reading "Welcome to the Miss America Cattle Auction"; another maneuvered a large Miss America marionette, with rods and strings animating its arms and legs. The cardboard puppet was an effigy, cartoonishly painted to have blonde hair, pale skin, long eyelashes, and a red, white, and blue bathing suit with gold stars over the breasts. Three women encircled the figure, attached to it by lengths of chain loosely shackled around their necks. The women bound to Miss America included two of the few, perhaps only Black women to participate in the protest - Kennedy and Allen. In this piece of agitprop, they acted out a literal "enslavement" to beauty standards. In contrast to Kennedy's nonconformist costume, Allen appeared to adhere to the civil rights tradition of picketing in one's Sunday best: she wore a well' tailored, floral-patterned shift, with a double strand of pearls round her neck; a small purse hung from one elbow and her hair was pressed and arranged in a modest beehive. Thus, the two women fashioned themselves as protestors in quite opposing ways. But they joined in protesting against the Miss America Pageant by acting out slavery to the national ideal of white womanhood within the context of an overwhelmingly white feminist protest. This scene of the documentary complicates the reductive image memory and mass-media representations of the protest. Allen and Kennedy's participation in the skit and their embodiment of the oppression of beauty culture as African Americans allowed the women's liberation movement to fully capitalize on the slavery metaphor. Their performance helped make the argument, neglected by the mainstream media, that regimes of white beauty perpetuated racial, as well as sexual, subjugation. Whereas our current popular understanding of the protest is that it was irrelevant to women of color, Kennedy and Allen insisted on the opposite; as Black women, they were doubly oppressed by the pageant and thus all the more invested in abolishing it. In a range of ways, both Miss Black America contestants and women's liberation protestors selectively transgressed and enacted modes of respectability in order to redefine the relationship among ideal womanhood, race, and national identity. Their strategies met stark limits. Kennedy's purposeful violations of Black respectability and cogent intersectional critique of beauty were not only entirely ignored by the media, but continue to remain invisible in most feminist histories. Allen's simultaneous fidelity to a waning mode of Black respectability and a rising women's rebellion against gender norms was rendered nonsensical in the New York Times . White feminists on the boardwalk, their fashion choices representing a spectrum of class, gender, and political positions, were derided in the popular press as hysterical radicals for opposing something as suppos- edly benign as the Miss America Pageant. They were attacked as undeserving, lesbian traitors to the nation and the family. Williams's foray into the discourse and fashion of Black Power, from the safety of the gender and class decorum

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 92 • Feminist Formations 27.2

of the nonviolent civil rights protest movement, earned her fifteen minutes of fame. Her impact on the Miss America Pageant was negligible compared to the new wave of Black beauty culture and pageants she heralded. These limits evidence the overwhelming trivialization that women's political speech faced and the power of the Miss America Pageant's iconography to link white femininity to conservative political values. As the Black freedom struggle evolved and women's liberation emerged over the course of the late 1960s, each drew from a set of symbolic resources, with ramifications for how effectively social movements could stage their desire for radical, intersectional politics, and how legible these performances would be to the nation.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Amey Victoria Adkins, Kathleen Antonioli, Erin Arizzi, Sarah Deutsch, Kimberly K. Lamm, Gunther Peck, Stephanie Ryti- lahti, Michael Stauch, and Robyn Wiegman for their valuable encouragement and input to this project. She also thanks Feminist Formations' three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on the manuscript.

Qeorgia Paige Welch is a doctoral candidate in history and feminist studies at Duke University. Her research focuses on state formations and social movements in the late-twentieth-century United States . Her dissertation , " Right of Way: Equal Employment Opportunity on the Trans Alaska Oil Pipeline ," examines transforma- tions of liberalism, gender, and economic citizenship during the 1970s. She received a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women's Studies in 2014. She can be reached at [email protected]. Primary and secondary sources to supplement teaching this article can be found at georgiapaigewelch.com.

Notes

1. Letter, Adrian Phillips to Roy Wilkins, July 30, 1968, box 8:107, folder 7, in National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Records (1842-1999), Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NAACP Records); Memorandum, Roy Wilkins to Henry L. Moon, August 9, 1968, box 8:107, folder 7, in NAACP Records. 2. Letter, Oliver W. Harrington to Jack Lawrence, May 1, 1947, box 2A381, "Miss America 1940-47" folder, in NAACP Records. 3. Memorandum, Henry L. Moon to Roy Wilkins, August 14, 1968, box 8:107, folder 7, in NAACP Records. 4. Letter, Barbee William Durham to Roy Wilkins, September 8, 1968, box 8:107, folder 7, in NAACP Records; letter, John A. Morseli to Charles Bryant, September 9, 1968, box 8:107, folder 7, in NAACP Records.

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 Georgia Paige Welch • 93

5. For others that see the protest as a defining moment for the movement due to the media recognition that it received, see Flora Davis (1991), Alice Echols (1989), Sara M. Evans (2003), and Ruth Rosen (2000). 6. Peggy Dobbins recalls Bonnie Allen and Florynce Kennedy as the only two African American women at the protest (Dobbins, personal communication with the author, May 15, 2009). 7. Kennedy made this claim in an undated interview with Marcia Cohen, whose 1988 The Sisterhood is a lone exception to the erasure of Kennedy from the 1968 Miss America Pageant protest, aside from Kennedy's own brief account in Color Me Flo (1976). (Transcript of interview by Marcia Cohen, in the Marcia Cohen Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts [hereafter Schlesinger Library].) 8. Lindsey Van Gelder, "Bra Burners and Miss America," New York Post , undated newspaper clipping (1968), in Susan Brownmiller Papers, MC 532, folder 20.10, Schlesinger Library; letter, Robin Morgan to Richard Jackson, August 29, 1968, and Notes (n.d.), box Si 7, "Demonstrations: Miss America 1968" folder, in Robin Morgan Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Düke University, Durham, North Carolina (hereafter RMP). 9. Washington, D.C. Women's Liberation, "Slavery Exists" flier (1968), box Si 7, "Demonstrations: Miss America 1068" folder, in RMP. 10. "Women Only" flier (1968), box Si 7, "Demonstrations: Miss America 1968" folder, in RMP. 11. The clippings in box S17, "Demonstrations: Miss America 1968" folder, in RMP include Associated Press articles from the New York Post , Chicago Sun-Times, Canton (Ohio) Repository , Wichita (Kan.) Beacon , and St. Joseph (Mo.) News-Press. 12. In the mid-1970s, the Newsreel Company was renamed Third World Newsreel to reflect an increased commitment to communities of color.

References

"ist 'Miss Black America' Pageant to Be Staged in Atlantic City." 1968. Chicago Daily Defender , August 31. Ahmed'Ghosh, Huma. 2003. "Writing the Nation on the Beauty Queen's Body: Impli^ cations for a 'Hindu' Nation." Meridians: Feminism , Race, Transnationalism 4 (1): 205-27. Alexander, Shana. 1968. "Hooray! Getting Back to Normal." Life magazine, September 20: 28. Arkow, Phil. 1968. "The America Some Missed." Daily Pennsylvanian , September 12: 1, 4. Baldwin, Davarian L. 2007. Chicago's New Negroes : Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 1999. The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baraka, Amiri. 1991. "Black People!" In The Leroi Jones/ Amiri Baraka Reader, edited by William J. Harris, 224. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press. "Before There Was a Miss Black America Pageant." 2014. Miss Black America, http:// www.missblackamerica.com/IntroToMBAPpgi.htm.

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 94 * Feminist Formations 27.2

Bender, Marylin. 1968. "Valeria Solanis a Heroine to Feminists." New York Times , June

14- Bradley, Patricia. 2003. Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 1963-1975. Jackson: University Press of Mississippl. Brown-Nag in, Tomiko. 2012. Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement . New York: Oxford University Press. Burstein, Patricia. 1975. "Lawyer Flo Kennedy Enjoys Her Reputation as Radicalism's Rudest Mouth." People magazine, April 14. Canaday, John. 1965. "What Miss America Is Made Of." New York Times Sunday Magazine , September 18: 124, 126, 129. Chappell, Marisa, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward. 1999. "'Dress modestly, neatly ... as if you were going to church': Respectability, Class, and Gender in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Early Civil Rights Movement." In Gender in the Civil Rights Movement , edited by Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith, 69-100. New York: Garland Publishing. Cohen, Colleen Ballerino, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje, eds. 1996. Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Marcia. 1988. The Sisterhood : The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World. New York: Simon & Schuster. "Contest Slated to Select Miss Black America." 1968. Los Angeles Times , August 29. Countryman, Matthew. 2006. Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Craig, Maxine Leeds. 2002. Ain 1 1 a Beauty Queen ? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race. New York: Oxford University Press.

Theory 7 (2): 159-77. Curtis, Charlotte. 1968a. "Miss America Pageant Is Picketed by 100 Women." New York Times , September 8.

Davis, Flora. 1991. Moving the Mountain : The Women's Movement in America since i960. New York: Simon & Schuster. "Demand Integrated Floats at Miss America '66 Pageant." 1966. New York Amsterdam News, September 10: 27. Dow, Bonnie J. 2003. "Feminism, Miss America, and Media Mythology." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 6 (1): 127-49. Echols, Alice. 1989. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975. Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Evans, Sara M. 2003. Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End. New York: Free Press. Ezekiel, Judith. 2002. Feminism in the Heartland. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Fahs, Breanne. 2001. "Ti-Grace Atkinson and the Legacy of Radical Feminism." Feminist Studies 37 (3): 561-90. Freedman, Estelle B. 2002. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York: Ballantine Books. Goodrich, David L. 1965. "The Discovery of Miss America." Saturday Evening Post, November 6: 36-41. Gosse, Van. 2006. "A Movement of Movements: The Definition and Periodization of

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 Georgia Paige Welch • 95

the New Left." In A Companion to Post'1945 America , edited by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, 277-302. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Greene, Christina. 2005. Our Separate Ways: Women and the Black Freedom Movement in Durham, North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Greenńeldboyce, Nell. 2008. "Pageant Protest Sparked Bra-Burning Myth." Morning Edition, National Public Radio, September 5. Hamlin, Kimberly A. 2004. "Bathing Suits and Backlash: The First Miss America Pageants, 1921-1927." In There She Is, Miss America : The Politics of Sex, Beauty, and Race in America's Most Famous Pageant , edited by Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin, 27-52. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hammel, Lisa. 1968. "A Class of Fledgling Pickets Gets the Word: 'Make It Exciting, Make It Swing!'" New York Times , August 4. Hesford, Victoria. 2013. Feeling Women's Liberation . Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. 1994. Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. "Illinois Girl Named Miss America." 1968. New York Times , September 8. Inghram, Glen. 2006. "NAACP Support of the Vietnam War: 1963-1969." Western Journal of Black Studies 30 (1): 54-61. Johnson, Thomas. 1967. "'Keep Pressure on,' Negroes Are Urged in Atlantic City Talk." New York Times , August 28. Kennedy, Florynce. 1976. Color Me Flo: My Hard Life and Good Times . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Klemesrud, Judy. 1968. "There's Now Miss Black America." New York Times , September 9. Knupfer, Anne Meis. 1996. Toward a Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African American Women's Clubs in Turn-ofthe-Century Chicago . New York: NYU Press. Lim, Shirley. 2005. A Feeling of Belonging : Asian American Women's Public Culture, 1930-1960. New York: NYU Press. Lyons, Leonard. 1968. "The Lyons Den." New York Post , August 31. Martin, Courtney. 2013. "Beauty Pageants Should Die." New York Times , September 12. Mendes, Kaitlynn. 2001. Feminism in the News: Representations of the Women's Movement since the 1960s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mercer, Kobena. 1987. "Black Hair/Style Politics." New Formations: AJournal of Culture, Theory & Politics 3 (winter): 33-54. "Miss America Gets Some Competition." 1968. American Druggist , September 23: 69. "Miss America Is a Fink!" 1968. Guardian , August 31. "Miss America Names Negro to Its Board." 1968. New York Times , August 1. Morgan, Robin. 1970. Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement , edited by Robin Morgan, 584-88. New York: Random House.

House.

Norton.

"Move to Get Negroes in 'Miss America' Contest." 1968. JET, August 28: 52. "Negro Girls Sought to Enter Contests for Miss America." 1968. New York Times, August 14.

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 q6 • Feminist Formations 27.2

"Negroes Accuse Police in Resort of Brutality." 1967. New York Times , August 24. "Negroes Plan Show to Rival Contest for Miss America. 1968. New York Times, August

29. "A New Way to Get to Be Miss America." 1968. Life magazine, September 20: 91-92. Newsreel. 1968. Up Against the Wall Miss America . Documentary short, DVD. Nielsen Media Research, Inc. 2007. "Beauty Pageant Viewership." TVbythenumbers. com. "'No Colored, No Pageant/ Warns Savage." 1965. Baltimore Afro-American, September 18: 14. "No More Miss America!" 1970. In Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement , edited by Robin Morgan, 584-88. New York: Random House. Peiss, Kathy Lee. 1998. Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture. New York : Metropolitan Books. Philips, McCandlish. 1964. "Miss America Pageant: A Carefully Promoted Spectacled Dedicated to Glory of Atlantic City." New York Times , September 6: 38. "Pickets Assail Times Over Negro Printer." 1968. New York Timest August 6: 15. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). 2013. MAKERS: Women Who Make America , video documentary series. Randolph, Sherie M. 2009. "'Women's Liberation or . . . Black Liberation, You're Fight' ing the Same Enemies': Florynce Kennedy, Black Power, and Feminism." In Want to Start a Revolution 1 Radical Women in the Black Freedom Strugglet edited by Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard, 223-47. New York: NYU Press. Redd, Nancy. 2013. "Feminists Can Wear Crowns." New York Times , September 12. Roberts, Blain. 2013. "Racial Politics and Miss America." New York Times , January 15. Rooks, Noliwe M. 1996. Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rosen, Ruth. 2000. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America . New York: Viking. Sangari, Kumkum. 2002. "New Patriotisms: The Beauty Queen and the Bomb." In From Gender to Nation , edited by Rada Ivekovic and Julie Mostov, 153-70. New Delhi, India: Zubaan. Shaw, Stephanie. 1996. What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era . Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simon, Bryant. 2006. Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America . New York: Oxford University Press. Tai, Pauline. 1968. "Miss America Pageant Chosen as Latest Target of Protestors." Wall Street Journal, September 6. Theoharis, Jeanne. 2006. "Black Freedom Studies: Re^Imagining and Redefining the Fundamentals." History Compass 4 (2): 348-67.

"There She Is, Miss America." 2013. New York Times , September 12. Third World Newsreel. (N.d.). "History." https://www.twn.org/twnpages/about/history .aspx. Van Gelder, Lindsey. 1992. "The Truth about Bra-Burners." Ms. magazine, September/ October: 80-81.

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 Georgia Paige Welch • 97

Walker, Susannah. 2007. Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Watson, Elwood. 2013. "Beneficial for Women of Color." New York Times , September 12. White, Shane, and Graham J. White. 1998. Styliri: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. "The Winner, a Rival in Black and Some Ribroast Ribbing." 1968. Life magazine, September 20: 92. Wolcott, Victoria W. 2001. Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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