Miss Black America pageant reclaims activist roots in `rebirth` at 50
(World News USA)

The Miss Black America pageant is not to be regarded as a black Miss America pageant. Since its founding in 1968, the organization has forged its own path -- with its own syndicated television network -- to proudly celebrate the beauty, talent and intelligence of black women, long excluded from mainstream pageants. In recent years, the pageant´s `rebirth` aims to rekindle its protest roots to address ongoing disparities in perceptions and treatment of minorities, said founder J. Morris Anderson. `We are really concentrating on some of these problems that existed for black people in the 1960s and still exist today,` Anderson said. `We are aware that there´s an absolute...