Mickey McElya

speaker

374 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 3 Aug

Mickey McElya’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Fresh Air · Miss America ‘68, women’s lib, and the politics of beauty · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

So these women came to Atlantic City, these protesters, these activists, armed with the language of the Black freedom struggle, fires declaring slavery exists.

They're chanting about liberation.

And they take in much of that vocabulary from Black people without ever really seeing the

the Black women standing right there.

And that is not a footnote, although it has been for several decades.

That's kind of the crack in the foundation of the whole movement, the one that never really got repaired, really, even to this day.

When did you realize this story was about that fracture?

Yeah, absolutely.

And

In 2009, I read a book by the sociologist Maxine Leeds Craig, and the book's title is Ain't I a Beauty Queen?

And it was about black beauty culture, about connections between black pageantry and activism.

And the introduction to that book starts with the two protests that happened against the Miss America pageant that weekend in Atlantic City.

Now, by that time, I had been a professor of history.

I had been a professor of women, gender, race, and sexuality for four years.

Worked on this in graduate school.

I was teaching lectures about the Miss America pageant and this protest, right?

I was using it as a way to get at all of these things and also to try to challenge the suggestion that this was somehow superficial.

I had never heard of the Miss Black America pageant.

You didn't.

I don't think I have ever had a moment of greater despair.

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