Forget Miss USA. I could care less. Here's a fascinating New York Times City Room blog post by Jennifer 8. Lee on New York's Miss Subways pageant, which ran from 1941 to 1977, and was one of the first beauty pagaents in America to become integrated: There She Is, From a Trailblazing Beauty Pageant.
Some 35 years before Vanessa Williams became the first black Miss America, the Miss Subways pageant selected Brooklyn College student Thelma Porter as its first black winner in 1948. The first Asian American Miss Subway, Helen Lee, won in 1949. (Too bad she had to be labeled "Exotic," as pictured above...)
Sure, it's just a beauty pageant. Still, you can't deny the symbolic importance for its time. The photo of Miss Subways was on thousands of subway cars each month, and activists believed that image of a black woman would send a powerful media message. Back then it was a subway car... today, it's the TV.
