Miss Black USA Pageant
national scholarship competition for women
The Miss Black USA Scholarship Pageant is a national scholarship competition for young women of African descent that was founded in 1986 by Karen Arrington. While Ms. Arrington has a long-standing history of hosting a national Miss Black USA Scholarship Pageant, her system has not been exclusive in doing so consecutively. As indicated by the chart below, there have been some years where "no pageant was held" by Ms. Arrington's State of Maryland organized non-profit, for example in years such as 1998, 1999 and 2000. However, similar to Miss USA and Miss America both being national systems, there have been other non-profits to host national scholarship pageants to celebrate Black women, with documented queens.
The Miss Black USA Pageant System founded by Ms. Arrington is a non-profit corporation in the state of Maryland, recognized under the 501(c)3 code of the Internal Revenue Service. The current titleholder under her pageant system is Harmony Edosomwan of Vermont, who was crowned on August 9, 2026.
History and former titleholders
The first titleholder was Tamiko Gibson, representing Maryland, who was crowned Miss Black USA 1987 at the JW Marriot in Washington, D.C., on June 6, 1987.
The public source identifies “Miss Black USA Pageant” as national scholarship competition for women. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Miss, Black and Pageant.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6876239. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1998, 1999 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Miss Black USA Pageant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.