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Nia Franklin became Miss America 2019 Sunday night in Atlantic City.
Franklin, 24, who competed as Miss New York, is the first Miss America not to wear swimsuits in the contest. However, she is the fourth Miss New York to win in the last six years.
Monday afternoon, Franklin appeared on the windy beach under a gray sky for a traditional photo shoot, the post-coronation dip, which involves some choreographed jumps in the Atlantic. She wore a simple black short-sleeved sweatshirt and sweatpants announcing the new Miss America 2.0 logo. She then quickly took the wheel by Miss America's CEO, Regina Hopper, to begin her pageant duties.
Here are some details about the Queen of Pageant:
- She did not really miss the swimsuit contest. The elimination of swimsuits has caused a lot of internal conflict within the Miss America organization and among the contest volunteers, state directors and the former Miss Americas. However, Franklin pointed to a practical advantage of his exit. When she learned that the contest no longer included bikinis, she allowed herself to eat more. "I'm worth more than that," and all the other competitors, she said about the smashed parade.
- She has a plan to repair Miss America. Pageant Factions? Flaws on the competition board? State reenactments demand the resignation of President Gretchen Carlson and the Contest CEO? No problem, said Franklin. She knows the answer. "I do not want to sound arrogant, but you look at it," she said at a post-contest press conference. "It will be a wonderful year, I really believe in this organization, I've had it for a long time." She wants to focus on the "positives" of mentoring and fraternity, she said. "That's what will help us see 100 more years." (The show was launched in 1921 by Atlantic City businessmen eager to keep people on the sidewalk after Labor Day.)
- She sang the opera during the contest. Franklin chose to sing "Quando m & # 39; en Vo" of Puccini's "La Boheme". Betty Cantrell, Miss America 2016, who also sang Puccini – "Tu Tu Piccolo Iddio" of "Madama Butterfly", was the last to win the title after performing opera. (For the record, like Franklin, Cantrell also wore a red dress during his performance.)
- She got involved in the opera because she wanted to study music composition. That's what Franklin did at the University of East Carolina and earned his master's degree at the School of the Arts at the University of North Carolina. "I read piano in the ear and I was playing music, but I did not feel trained enough to play the piano at an audition," Franklin told NJ Advance Media before his victory. "So I decided to study the classical voice because I was already a singer, I always had a good sense of pitch and I sang in the choir growing up and I was in the high school choir and I wrote songs since the age of 5 years. "Franklin sang the chorus of a song that she wrote at that age for journalists after winning (see the clip above – it was a success).
- She's not from New York, but two of the last three Miss Miss New York. Franklin's hometown is Brooklyn, but she is from Winston-Salem, North Carolina and has previously competed in Miss North Carolina. She is in good company. In 2012, Mallory Hagan, originally from Alabama but attending Miss New York, won the crown. In 2013, Nina Davuluri, who was born in Syracuse but grew up in Oklahoma and Michigan, also competed as Miss New York and won (thus becoming the first Indo-American candidate to do so). In 2014, Kira Kazantsev, from California but winner of Miss New York, also won the crown. Other former Miss Americas that were Miss New York include Vanessa Williams, who won in 1983 and resigned in 1984 after a nude photo scandal. For his part, Franklin thinks he is from another state, but being immersed in New York makes him a more complete candidate.
- She helped her father fight cancer. Franklin said that she had donated stem cells as part of her father's treatment for cancer. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma when she was an undergraduate student at East Carolina University. At a post-show press conference, she stated that competition in competition helped her to pay for her university studies after her father's diagnosis. (Franklin wins a $ 50,000 purse with the crown.)
- She has "New York Grit". This is how Franklin described the persistence of the move of apartments more than five times "because of the subletting" in the Big Apple. Franklin, who won Miss New York's Miss New York Borough Contest, moved to Brooklyn after being selected for the Kenan Fellowship program at Lincoln Center Education.
- She advocates arts education. During the contest, Franklin stated that as a minority student in a school attended mainly by white students, she was able to find herself through music. Prior to her victory, Franklin told us that she had been inspired to make the promotion of arts education her social impact initiative, or competition platform, because a particular student she had met during her masters studies. At the time, she was a member of ArtistCorps, which is part of AmeriCorps. The program places artists in public schools and community groups where they work with students with high needs. She met a kindergarten student, Noah, who was then 2 years old. "He had a very limited vocabulary," she said. "He had an ability to pay attention to a fly." After being exposed to the music and arts program, Noah's vocabulary grew from about 20 words to 200 words and he became "more lively," she said, and began to pay attention in class.
- She represented a very New York franchise. Franklin paid tribute to Radio City Rockettes at the Miss America Show Fashion Show on Saturday. The traditional Atlantic City procession features contestants wearing excessively high suits and high heels adorned with appropriate details (Miss New Jersey, Jaime Gialloreto, wearing a cape and red horns inspired by the Jersey Devil). Franklin donned a red and white plush outfit and white gloves to accompany his red and silver shoes. Here, she holds a heel for the crowd while the rain held her in a parade car.
Amy Kuperinsky can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @AmyKup or on Facebook.
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