One of the few Miss Americas that I paid attention to died last month at 87 years of age. She was Yolande Betbeze, who won the crown in 1950 and immediately stepped out of the box. She shocked the Miss America organizers when she refused to appear in a bathing suit for cheesecake photos, she publicly criticized the pageant for excluding minorities, and she picketed for civil rights.
Born and raised in Mobile, Alabama, she was educated, K-12, in a convent school, and then attended Spring Hill College* in Mobile. A talented opera singer she was recruited for beauty pageants which she won all the way to Miss America.
Yolande was a rebel. After winning the Miss America contest she refused to do the usual promotional photographs in a bathing suit, exclaiming, “I’m an opera singer, not a pinup!” She later explained that she only entered the contest as a means of getting out of Alabama. Her defiant stance created a domino effect that changed the course of the Miss America Pageant. Catalina Swimwear withdrew its sponsorship of the pageant and opened two new pageants: the Miss Universe Pageant and the Miss USA Pageant, both of which required participants to wear Catalina Swimsuits. Additionally, Yolande used her public platform to condemn de facto exclusionary policies in some Miss America preliminaries. She disassociated herself from the pageant until it changed its policies and admitted minorities to the contests.
Yolande was a social activist. She stood vigil outside New York’s Sing Sing prison in 1953 to demonstrate against the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted of conspiracy to pass atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union. She also was a volunteer with the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. In 1960, she was photographed as she picketed outside the Woolworth store in Manhattan to protest the segregation and support the sit-ins of black students at Woolworth lunch counters throughout the South.
Yolande was an intellectual. Throughout the 1950s she continued her studies of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. She was well read on philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and David Hume. “I’m a Southern girl,” she often explained, “but I’m a thinking girl.”
Needless to say, the Miss America pageant did not appreciate Ms. Betbeze’s actions against it. Although the pageant reconciled with her in more recent years, back when they celebrated a major anniversary of the pageant by inviting all living former Miss Americas to the event, they did not invite her. She laughed it off other as she did other criticisms.
Although she married a rich Hollywood producer and lived the life of a socialite she continued her activities. She continued to sing, she helped to found an off-Broadway theater, and she continued her social justice advocacy, maintaining memberships in the NAACP and CORE.
*P.S.: A note about Springhill College, which Yolande Betbeze attended. Springhill College is a Jesuit school, founded in 1830, making it the first Catholic college in the Southeast, the third oldest Jesuit college, and the fifth oldest Catholic college in the United States. Notably, it started admitting black students into all its departments in 1954; however, the integration of the school had started before then. In the summer of 1948 it welcomed a group of black teachers—all seeking recertification—into a course on English literature. Soon thereafter, the evening classes were desegregated. And in 1954, before the Brown v. Board decision—two years before Arthurine Lucy was admitted but denied entrance to the University of Alabama and nine years before Governor George Wallace attempted to block the entrance of James Hood and Vivian Malone—they admitted a transfer student from Loyola of Chicago, who was joined by seven other black students in the fall.
I must admit that all this was happening all around me at the time and I knew nothing about it until later a black (of course) classmate of mine at Alabama State told me that he had attended Springhill for a year before going into the military and then coming to State.