With Her Fist Raised by Laura L. Lovett

Author:Laura L. Lovett [Lovett, Laura L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

“RACISM WITH ROSES”

Miss New York City and the Transition to Harlem

For her seventy-fifth birthday, Dorothy organized a fundraising event to benefit a community garden she’d helped develop in order to provide access to healthy food and youth engagement in her new home in Jacksonville, Florida. Part of the celebration involved reshooting the iconic photograph of Dorothy and Gloria Steinem. It was rare to have the two women in the same place at the same time at that stage of their lives, so I took advantage of the opportunity to interview them over breakfast.

We had a long conversation, at the end of which, I asked them if there had been times when they didn’t see eye-to-eye. Gloria responded, “Well, we were certainly learning from each other.”

Dorothy reflected, agreed, and then added, “Okay. There was one. There was one major one.”

“For over sixty-five years,” Dorothy continued, “America had not deemed a Black woman beautiful or talented enough to be Miss America.”

“Oh yeah, that came up,” Gloria exclaimed. “The beauty contest!”

Dorothy felt strongly that the Miss America pageant shouldn’t feature only “white women’s beauty,” so in 1979, she bought the franchise for the Miss Greater New York City pageant.

“I never ever objected to Dorothy doing it,” Gloria clarified, laughing, “but I wouldn’t have done it! I wouldn’t have bought a Miss America franchise. I mean, I wouldn’t.”

Following up later, Dorothy remained careful in discussing this point of departure between the two activists. She remembered thinking, “Oh, I hope Gloria doesn’t get mad, but I have to prove that Black women are beautiful and talented, and we should not be discriminated against.”

Dorothy knew about the famous feminist protest, organized by New York Radical Women, against the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey, in September 1968. Influenced by media savvy tactics first introduced by friend and mentor Flo Kennedy, Robin Morgan, Carol Hanisch, Shulamith Firestone, and Chude Pam Allen organized a protest of about four hundred people primarily from New York on the Atlantic City boardwalk to decry the impact of the “Degrading Mindless-Boob-Girlie Symbol.” In their words, the contest awarded an “Irrelevant Crown on the Throne of Mediocrity.”1 The protest gave the women’s movement its most notorious nom de guerre, Bra Burner, after organizers released a press statement announcing they would burn the tools of female oppression in a “Freedom Trash Can.” Although they failed to get a fire permit, they chose not to correct the New York Post headline, “Bra Burners and Miss America,” since the reference drew on parallels to the draft card burning protests of the Vietnam War and to nineteenth-century dress reformers like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who urged women to burn their corsets. The protest also brought the phrase “Women’s Lib” into the homes of millions of Americans after four women unfurled a “Women’s Liberation” banner made from three double-size bedsheets in the Atlantic City auditorium just before the winner was announced in the nationally broadcast event.2

This now-infamous protest was not the protest that Miss America Pageant, Inc.

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