In 1980, Arkansas had its first African-American Miss Arkansas, Lencola Sullivan of Morrilton (Conway County) she became a runner-up at the Miss America competition, in which she was also the first African-American contestant to place in the top five. The Miss Arkansas Pageant has provided three winners of the national title: Donna Axum of El Dorado (Union County) in 1963, Elizabeth Ward of Russellville (Pope County) in 1981, and Savvy Shields of Fayetteville (Washington County) in 2016. The 2016 pageant was the last in Hot Springs, with organizers announcing their intention to relocate the event to Little Rock (Pulaski County). In its last years at the racetrack, the pageant drew up to 9,000 paying observers, but the seating of the convention center limited the number of guests to 4,600. In 1958, the pageant was held at the Oaklawn Park Racetrack (now Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort) in Hot Springs (Garland County), where it remained each year until 1965, when it was held indoors at the newly built Hot Springs Convention Center. The 1945 event, the first directed by Allen, was held at the football field in Brinkley. Francis County), Newport (Jackson County), and Paragould (Greene County). At that time, the pageant was sponsored by the East Arkansas Young Businessmen’s Club and took place in various football and baseball stadiums in communities including Helena (Phillips County), Forrest City (St. Allen compared the professional organization of the national contest to the amateur production of Arkansas and resolved to improve Arkansas’s pageant, giving the annual winners a better opportunity to compete on the national stage. Although winners were chosen each year since 1938, the second Miss Arkansas to compete for the national title was Doris Love in 1943.ĭorathy Allen, later state senator from Monroe County, was the chaperone for Mineola Graham of Brinkley (Monroe County), crowned Miss Arkansas of 1944 and therefore becoming a contestant for Miss America in Atlantic City, New Jersey, that autumn.

The next year, for the first time, the winner of the pageant was sent to compete in the Miss America pageant, thus marking the official beginning of the Miss Arkansas competition as recognized by most journalists and historians. However, she was later disqualified for being married, and the competition was halted until 1938, when the winner was Lorene Bailey. The first winner of the pageant was Vivian Ferguson. The competition is managed by a non-profit organization and co-sponsored by the Miss Arkansas Scholarship Foundation, Inc.

Forty-five smaller pageants lead up to the crowning of Miss Arkansas. The pageant is Arkansas’s preliminary for the Miss America Pageant, which began in 1921. The Miss Arkansas Pageant officially began in 1939, though two competitions before that year set the stage for the pageant.

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