Jamaica Ten Type Beauty Contest (Transcript)
Since scholarship on the Ten Type Beauty Contest is limited, details on the pageant was taken from research conducted by Dr. Rochelle Rowe in her book, “Imagining Caribbean Womanhood: Race, Nation & Beauty Competitions, 1929-1970”.
In 1955, Jamaica held the “Ten Types Beauty Contest” where ten separate beauty queens were selected based on their race and complexion. With immense positive feedback from local and the international press, the pageant projected the idea of Jamaica been a racial paradise.With this branding of Jamaica society, the pageant became one of the biggest influences in shaping the nation's new national motto: "Out of Many, One People”. Jamaica 300’s Celebration
In the early 1950's, Jamaica’s minister of finance, Donald Sangster was busy working on a celebration that he explained will be the commemorating of “the three hundredth anniversary of British rule in Jamaica”. As Sangster explained in a House of Representatives debate in September 1954, 'It happened that 1955 was chosen ... because it was necessary to have a date within this decade”. This celebratory idea came to Donald Sangster after he visited New Zealand in 1950 and saw that country commemorating the centennial celebrations of the founding of the city of Christchurch. As Howard Johnson stated in his paper, “The 'Jamaica 300' Celebrations of 1955: Commemoration in a Colonial Polity”, Sangster main objectives were to “expand the industrial sector by attracting external investment capital and increase the island's tourist trade”. This need for the celebration to attract tourist to the island to drive economic growth was co-signed by Wendell Malliet, a columnist in the Daily Gleaner. As Mr. Malliet wrote: “Jamaica’s Tercentenary should be used to show the world our need for aid, our determination to improve our lot and raise our standard of living, and our responsibility to faithfully discharge obligations assumed. Every effort should be made to bring thousands of visitors to the Island where they may see for themselves what we have to offer as an area for sound and profitable investment and a tourist paradise”
By mid-year, Sangster had a few ideas for this celebration. The most tooted was inviting foreign dignitaries to visit Jamaica during the tercentenary year where these visits would direct welcome foreign attention to the island and promote its reputation overseas. Announced dignitaries included Princess Margaret of England and President Maglorie of Haiti. A Jamaica Historical Society, chaired by Sangaster and dominated by British personnel, was then formed to served as the celebration’s executive committee. Out of this committee came plans for a ceremony, held at Port Royal in May, to commemorate the British landing at Passage Fort. However not everybody was onboard with these celebrations and its plans in place. For one, the Kingston and St. Andrew Corporation (KSAC), which at this time was dominated by the opposition, the People National Party (PNP) stated that they would prefer that 'the celebrations be directed towards showing the emergence of Jamaica as a nation at the national level and on the municipal level, the establishment and growth of Kingston as the premiere metropolis in the British Caribbean.' With this they also proposed the 'enshrining of national heroes e.g. Marcus Garvey, George William Gordon & JAG Smith”. Then, Florizel Glasspole, the then PNP representative for the constituency of Eastern Kingston, stated his opposition. He stated: “I am 100% for Jamaica's existence in the British Commonwealth of Nations but I don't want to perpetuate British rule”
His party compatriot, Percival Broderick, who represented North Eastern Clarendon, took issue with celebrating the colonising of the island. Sharing the thought that nations did not celebrate their conquest but accomplishments, he said 'The English don't celebrate the time when the Picts and the Scots used to over-run England or the time when the hordes of Austria used to sweep across the Channel.'
There was also Kenneth Hill from the National Labour Party, NLP, who suggested that the celebrations be undertaken “with a motif and theme that we have got where we are in spite of Great Britain; in spite of imperialistic rule and colonialism ... and we are emerging in spite of handicaps with which we have been faced for three hundred years”. Still, despite the backlash, Donald Sangster went ahead with his plans. In fact, in January of 1955 he announced that the “celebrations would mark 300 years of 'progress and development as a junior partner with Britain in her vast Colonial enterprise”. As such, according to Jamaica Gleaner, the celebrations executive committee intended only to select the positive aspects of the British historical record in Jamaica and, omit the negative features of the colonial past. In the words of the newspaper report, it would involve 'the discarding of the bad things in the history of the past 300 years and the preservation and passage into our modern life of the good things.” However, 1955 was an election year. And at the end of the January 12 election, it was the PNP who prevailed winning 18 of the 32 seats on offer. As such, the 300th celebration planning would then be overseen by the PNP who we stated earlier - had opposition to the entire celebration. But, instead of cancelling the party rebranded it. In her paper, “Glorifying the Jamaican Girl”: The “Ten Types – One People” Beauty Contest’, notably historian Dr. Rochelle Rowe said: “The PNP, which took office in January 1955, promptly revised the tenor of the celebratory plans, changing it from a commemoration of three hundred years of British rule to a celebration of Jamaica’s three hundred years as a national entity with a distinctive history, culture, and people. ”
And with this rebrand, the highlight of this celebration to commentate 300 years of national pride, according to the PNP, was a beauty pageant to be held in May. And this beauty pageant was designed to showcase the diversity of Jamaica’s populace. Thus, the “Ten Type Beauty Contest” was born. History of Beauty Contests in Jamaica
The “Ten Types” pageant was to be different from any other pageant in the country’s history at this point. At the time, the main pageant on the island was the well-established “Miss Jamaica” beauty contest. “Miss Jamaica” began in 1929 and was sponsored by the Gleaner where the event aid in the popularity and subsequently, the circulation of the newspaper. The pageant was very white and elite and only catered to families of the white upper class in Jamaica. Anyone outside of that status was not even given the chance to enter much less win. Then in 1947, Aimee Webster, a wealthy Jamaican, acquired “Miss Jamaica” and merged it into her new “Miss British Caribbean” contest which was created to promote her newspaper - the Caribbean Post. With this, Webster sought to support the British West Indies Federation and herald the merits of the respectable, “well- born,” brown middle-class young woman as a symbol of the modernity, sophistication, and optimism of the postwar West Indian territories. And to the surprise of no-one, under Webster’s direction, the winners of both “Miss Jamaica” and “Miss British Caribbean” tended to be light-skinned brown women. However, sometime after Webster’s management of the “Miss Jamaica” contest, the pageant fell into lapse and was later acquired by the Bodybuilder’s Association in 1954, a private health establishment, managed by Keith Rhino. The Jamaica Tourist Board would then partnered with the Bodybuilder’s Association to sponsor the pageant. Together, they branded the role of “Miss Jamaica” as both a national representative and a cultural ambassador. As such, contestants could now win luxury prizes and enter international pageants such as “Miss World”. But according to Dr. Rowe:“In this format the brown participants who had been singled out by Webster’s contest lost status, unable to compete with white Jamaicans and to rise above the occasional place in the final lineup. Black women, meanwhile, were absent from the contest.”
However in 1955 In 1955, Theodore Sealy, the first Black editor of The Gleaner, called out the “Miss Jamaica” organizers for appointing yet another white “queen” in Marlene Fenton. According to Dr, Rochelle Rowe: “Sealy called it irresponsible to encourage foreigners to associate the better part of Jamaican society with whiteness and refinement at the expense of the wider population, whom he feared was still imagined as backward”
With this advocacy in mind, Sealy was soon announced as the organiser of the Ten Type Beauty Contest. And as the organizer of “Ten Types,” Sealy wanted to representative the diversity of the island - in, frankly, ten different ways. The Ten Type Beauty Contest
“The Ten Types Beauty Contest” was launched in May of 1955 as an inclusive beauty contest, under the theme: “Every lassie has an equal chance”. Its main sponsorship came from the Jamaica Tourist Board where its main promotion was driven by the the Star and the Gleaner. For approximately seven months, the competition toured the island, “uncovering a wealth of feminine charm. The Star staffed a caravan of photographer and reporters to cover the preliminaries events while members of the Jamaica Federation of Women act as chaperones. Now to note - the Jamaican Federation of Women was white led and although Black working class women could become members at some point, they were at the bottom of the organisation’s hierarchy. Still, with the Star distributing posters and leaflets all over the island, the public was invited to vote for their favourites based on the published photographs of entrants. However, final judging took place in private. By December of 1955, the winners were announced and these were the title and description placed on the ten separate beauty queens: Miss Ebony — A Jamaican girl of Black complexionMiss Mahogany — A Jamaican Girl of Cocoa-brown ComplexionMiss Satinwood — A Jamaican Girl of Coffee-and-Milk ComplexionMiss Golden Apple — A Jamaican Girl of Peaches-and-Cream ComplexionMiss Apple Blossom - A Jamaican Girl of European ParentageMiss Pomegranate — A Jamaican girl of White-Mediterranean ParentageMiss Sandalwood — A Jamaican Girl of Pure Indian Parentage] Miss Lotus — A Jamaican Girl of Pure Chinese ParentageMiss Jasmine — A Jamaican Girl of Part Chinese ParentageMiss Allspice — A Jamaican Girl of Part Indian Parentage
Now to note, although the objective of Ten Types was to move away from mainstream beauty ideals, the winning beauty queens were all slim and petite in frame as seen in the official photograph, which is the cover art for this episode. Also, to note, only one darker skin woman was in the list of ten winners: Miss Ebony. Local and International Reception
In the wake of the Ten Types contest, local reception was quite positive. Soon after, the international community started to show interest. In a world of racial segregation, to some, the pageant was the answer to a post-racial world. Edward Scott, an American journalist, described the patent as a model of racial tolerance in a August 10, 1955 article titled, “Beauty Contest of a Revolutionary Quality”. Specifically, he offered emmense praised to Miss Ebony, stating: “I do not know who made up that list of ten names, but it is a masterpiece of poetry, dignity and good taste. The various qualifications are beautifully prepared and I find myself admiring particularly the little Jamaican girl who does not protest that it is undemocratic to have a class for ‘Miss Apple Blossom,’ but who readily admits that she is ‘a Jamaican girl of Black complexion’ and proudly enters her name in the competition for ‘Miss Ebony.”
Then, the South African writer Peter Abrahams, would write in “Jamaica: An Island Mosaic”: “With line subtlety, the contest was both racial and multiracial... Black girls competed amongst themselves; Chinese and Chinese coloured amongst them- selves; the fair competed only against the fair... I wondered and asked, whether the organisers would, after they had chosen the winners from the ten types, choose a reigning queen from one of the ten. No one knew. People tended to shy away from this.”
The American based publication, Life Magazine would then published the “Ten Types” feature in its international edition. Likewise, Time Magazine also ran a feature on the competition. But most notably of the coverage was from Ebony, the Black American targeted magazine, which sent both its chief photographer and its managing editor to Jamaica to cover the finals of the competition. The team was hosted by the Jamaica Tourist Board. With this, Marshall Wilson, the white photographer of Ebony, was quoted in the Star, that the Ten Type competition was one of racial harmony which could convert racist. As he stated the following: “Jamaica is making an invaluable contribution to the development of better race relations in the United States… Travelers coming to the island from the United States… are very much interested to find that discrimination does not exist in Jamaican hotels or night clubs. Those Americans who believe in equality of races are able to point to the island as an example of how various peoples can live together in harmony. Those who are in favour of segregation are at first amazed — and often converted. By mixing on a social level with cultured colored persons, even the most die-hard believer in segregation begins to have doubts about his conviction.”
With this international reception of Jamaica has a paradise of racial harmony, the Jamaican Tourist Board hired new women clerical staff, of mid and darker complexion, to downplay prior criticism of colour and racial discrimination. Forward Movements
The “Ten Types” competition would resumed in 1959 until its demise in 1963. The Gleaner claimed that six thousand women had their photographs taken for entry into the competitions. Still, it eventually change the conversation around local pageantry on the island. In 1960, the Jamaican branch of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the organisation founded by Marcus Garvey, proposed its own beauty competition. Its contest would offer prizes geared toward educating and training women out of poverty. Then in 1962, the Black Gleaner sportswriter Alva Ramsay suggested in a public letter that in the year of Jamaican independence, a dark-skinned Black woman should be crowned “Miss Jamaica”. He stated: “I suggest either we go into the hedges and byways and select a Negro girl as ‘Miss Jamaica’ for the independence year or we adopt a modified Ten Types pattern and have four queens, — one a negro girl, one a white girl, one a Chinese and one an Indian”.
Two years later, Ramsay and his organisation, the Council for Afro-Jamaican Affairs, began its own “Miss Jamaica Nation” contest with the aim to rival “Miss Jamaica”. The first winner, Yvonne Whyte, came from a middle-class professional background but was praised at her crowning by PNP Senator Kenneth McNeill as “the first real country girl to win a beauty contest.” Whyte, who was celebrated among Black Jamaicans, made a visit to the independence celebrations of Nyasaland (today known as Malawi) where winners of this new patent were expected to travel to counties of the African continent as unofficial cultural ambassadors. But the most glaring pageant influence of the Ten Type Beauty Contest was the “Miss Jamaica Beauty Contest”, which began in 1963 as apart of the annual Jamaica Festival Celebrations. In 1975, the pageant was rebranded, with the purpose for greater emphasis on cultural awareness of beauty queens, the Jamaica Festival Queen Competition which still continue to this day. On the Elevation of Brownness
Still Dr. Rowe made note that Ten Type, more than anything else, propelled the elevation of brownness in Jamaica. As she wrote: "Ultimately, the overriding image of “Ten Types” was an expansive representation of brownness that suggested brown identity as the natural representative motif of Jamaica”
In just a few years, we will see the elevation of mixed race Jamaican-ness, and brownness, take shape. In 1959, In 1959, when Sheila Chong won that year’s Miss Jamaica contest, her Chinese and Black ethnicity took centre stage. Her diverse racial heritage dominated the press coverage where she was propelled as the “literal embodiment of Jamaicanness”. As Newday Magazine would write, “This is the first time the queen seemed to please everyone. Sheila Chong is a typical Jamaican girl. A Negro-Chinese-Syrian composite”. As such, it would come as no surprised to anyone that for the next two decade or so, white and light-skinned brown women dominated the pageant. It was not until 1978 that Miss Jamaica would have its first darker skinned Black woman - Joan McDonald. Still, at this time in the late 1950’s, many magazines would seized upon the Jamaican beauty queens of lighter complexion and those of mixed race. As one Vanity travel writer would wrote: “the Jamaican woman of mixed blood is the most beautiful I know in the Caribbean”. And it is this that one of the Jamaican Tourist Board most popular marketing campaigns was 1972 poster with the Trinidad and Tobago light-skinned native, Sintra Bronte, in the red swimsuit with Jamaica in bold black letters. As Dr. Maziki Thame would write in her paper, “Racal Hierarchy and the Elevation of Brownness in Creole Nationalism”: “In the postcolonial hierarchy of Jamaica, brownness was elevated and blackness remained at the bottom”.
Out Of Many, One People
Now Theodore Sealy, going off the triumph of the good coverage of Ten Type, would play a lead role in organising another Jamaican national event - the celebrations to mark Jamaican independence on August 6, 1962. With this role, Sealy took part in creating the nation’s new national motto - “Out of Many, One People.” Prior to this, the nation’s motto was “Indus Uterque Serviet Uni” which when translated from Latin means "The two Indians will serve as one” in reference to nation’s indigenous inhabitats, the Tainos, and their relationship to the European colonisers. As such, Sealy later acknowledged the role that the “Ten Types” beauty contest had in shaping the motto. As he wrote in “How We Celebrated: “The contest… was so popular that the concept entered the public consciousness and it was probably by force of habit that the members of the Legislature in 1962 choose the expression, “Out of Many, One People”.
However the timeline of Sealey’s assessment is not quite accurate as the Legislature was not in session in when the motto was announced in 1962 and according to Dr. Rowe, “the phrase was urged on by the Working Committee who needed a motto for publication on promotional material". Still, one cannot dismiss the major influence that competition had on the shaping of the new national motto. Over the years many sociologists, historians, anthropologists and public commentators have asserted the fact that the national motto of Jamaica was not chosen because we are melting pot of people but just like Ten Type - it re-assured the white and light-skinned privilege class of this racial paradise that exist in Jamaica. As the Jamaica Observer editorial would wrote in August 1, 2015 editorial, tilted “Out of many, one people: Motto or Myth?”, the national motto, “assure the wealthy and potential foreign investors that they had no need to fear the desperately poor Black masses. Second, it sought to convince the poor Black people that those with wealth were their genuine brothers and sisters. This was intended to head off violent expressions of the ever-present class struggles and any flirtation with communism”. Its key to remember that just a few years ago in 1959, the Caribbean was rocked by the Cuban revolution and a year later, in 1960, Henry Rebellion took place in Jamaica. And just like the dreams of Donald Sangster when he first declared the 300th celebration in 1954, the events to come of that celebration would morphs it way into the nation’s international reputation. As such, this racial paradise narrative, propelled by the Ten Types Beauty Contest and the national motto, was marketed in tourism packages to promote Jamaica as a nation of racial harmony, equality and equity. But even though that was the message told outside its borders, history shows us that was not the reality on the ground as Jamaican entered it post independence era. To this Dr. Thame writes: “the invisibility of blackness in the national motto; and its claims of egalitarianism and racial harmony were ways of silencing claims of racial injustice in the nation” .