Black Beauty History: Vanessa Williams

Williams was born in Tarrytown, New York, the daughter of music teachers Helen and Milton Augustine Williams, Jr.^[1][2] Williams and her younger brother Chris, who is also an actor, grew up in the predominantly white middle-class suburban area of Millwood, New York. Prophetically, her parents put “Here she is: Miss America” on her birth announcement.

Williams began competing in beauty pageants in the early 1980s. Williams won Miss New York in 1983, and went to the Miss America national pageant in Atlantic City. She was crowned Miss America 1984 on September 17, 1983 making her the first-ever African American Miss America. Prior to the final night of competition, Williams won both the Preliminary Talent and Swimsuit Competitions from earlier in the week. Williams’ reign as Miss America was not without its challenges and controversies. For the first time in pageant history, a reigning Miss America was the target of death threats and angry racist hate mail.

Ten months into her reign as Miss America, she received an anonymous phone call stating that nude photos of her taken by a photographer prior to her pageant days had surfaced. Williams believed the photographs were private and had been destroyed; she claims she never signed a release permitting the photos to be used.

The genesis of the photos dated back to 1982, when she worked as an assistant and makeup artist for Mount Kisco, N.Y. photographer Tom Chiapel. According to Williams, Chiapel advised her that he wanted to try a “new concept of silhouettes with two models.” He photographed Williams and another woman in several nude poses. The photographs depicted mild overtones of simulated lesbian sex, which was quite controversial for its time.

Hugh Hefner, the publisher of Playboy, was initially offered the photos, but turned them down. Later Hefner would explain why in People Weekly. “Vanessa Williams is a beautiful woman. There was never any question of our interest in the photos. But they clearly weren’t authorized and because they would be the source of considerable embarrassment to her, we decided not to publish them. We were also mindful that she was the first black Miss America.” Days later, Bob Guccione, the publisher of Penthouse, announced that his magazine would publish the photos in their September 1984 issue, and paid Chiapel for the rights to them without Williams’ consent. According to the PBS documentary, “Miss America,” the Vanessa Williams issue of Penthouse would ultimately bring Guccione a $14 million windfall.

After days of media frenzy and sponsors threatening to pull out of the upcoming 1985 pageant, Williams felt pressured by Miss America Pageant officials to resign, and did so in a press conference on July 23, 1984. The title subsequently went to first-runner up Suzette Charles, who is also African-American. In early September 1984, Vanessa filed an unheralded $500 million lawsuit against Chiapel and Guccione. According to a Williams family representative, she eventually dropped the suit to avoid further legal battles choosing to move on with her life. Vanessa is quoted as saying “the best revenge is success.”

Although she resigned from fulfilling the duties of a current Miss America, she was allowed to keep the bejeweled crown and scholarship money and is officially recognized by the Miss America Organization today as “Miss America 1984” and Suzette Charles as “Miss America 1984b.”

Williams continued on to have a very successful career as a recording artist who garnered multi Grammy nominations and produced multi-platinum albums. She came be seen nowadays as the fierce magazine editor Wilhelmena Slater on ABC’s “Ugly Betty”.

Black Beauty History: Bethann Hardison

Bethann Hardison (pictured second from the right) changed the face of the fashion industry as a black model in the sixties and seventies, and as a model agent later on. She made the careers of Veronica Webb, Talisa Soto, and Ralph Lauren poster boy Tyson Beckford, and was “like a coach” to Naomi Campbell. Although Hardison thinks that now, in New York, you’re exotic if you’re Caucasian, she still agrees that “the idea of beauty has remained the same, no matter how much influx, no matter who is buying, who is living next to you, or how many people walk past you on the street.” After she closed her agency in 1996, people told her the modeling business was slipping without her. “I didn’t want that responsibility,” she says. “The New York Times interviewed me and they wanted to know what was going to happen to all the people I’d helped. And that, at the time, was people of color. And I was like, they’re fine, they’re gonna be fine. And honey, little by little, it has died.”

Bethann, mother of Kadeem Hardison (better known as “Dwayne Wayne” to many) is still a pioneer in the fight for Black model representation. Recently she held a number of round-table discussions on the lack of black models during New York’s Fashion Week and in the modeling industry as a whole.