By Kay Wicker
A Black Miss America was once hard to imagine, but now one young woman has just been crowned while wearing her natural hair.
On Sept. 6, 25-year-old Regan Hutsell earned the 2027 title during the annual pageant at the Palm Beach County Convention Center and The Kravis Center for Performing Arts in West Palm Beach, Florida, becoming the 10th Black woman to win and the first to win while showcasing her natural hair.
After the contestants had been whittled down to two, Hutsell stood in a satin wine-colored column gown with a corset bodice and a thin wrap around her neck that dangled delicately down her back. Her natural curls were swept into a bouncy pineapple-style high ponytail with a curly bang, when her name was called. Visibly shocked and emotional, she hugged the runner-up, who smiled and mouthed, “I’m so happy for you!”
When Hutsell was crowned, her fellow beauty queens surrounded her in a loving, celebratory embrace as confetti and streamers rained down on the stage.
Her win includes a $50,000 scholarship and a year of service in 2027.
In a voiceover that played as she walked out during the competition’s introduction, Hutsell recited a quote by Maya Angelou: “If you’re always trying to be normal, you’ll never know how amazing you can be,” she said. “Her words are a reminder that if you’re always trying to be the person next to you, it only creates a limited version of who you are.
“I spent years trying to fit what I thought the standard of beauty was around me, trying to shape things like my body and my hair into what I saw in those closest to me,” her voiceover continued. “But the moment I learned to embrace myself is when I found my own magic. Life has been not about measuring success based on how well you fit into stereotypes, but by owning and embracing every unique, natural, and innate quality that you already possess.”
More than forty years after Vanessa Williams became the first Black woman to be crowned Miss America, and after nine others followed her, Hutsell’s curls mark yet another milestone in the pageant’s long and complicated history with Black women.
Hailing from Texas, Hutsell has made a name for herself in the dance world after becoming a Radio City Rockette at just 18 and dancing professionally with companies including the Birmingham Royal Ballet. All things she said during her remarks that she was told she was too tall to ever do. She is also studying health sciences with plans to become a physical therapist.
Her community service initiative, “Your Body Is Your Home,” inspired by her own recovery from an eating disorder, encourages healthier relationships with our bodies.
Speaking to People magazine, Hutsell said when she first entered pageantry, she was unsure whether she should straighten her hair or wear it naturally, especially after years spent in the dance world. She eventually tried straightening it, only to find that her hair “didn’t bounce back” the way it once did. Rather than risk further damage, she decided, “I’m going to wear it as is.”
When Miss America first launched in 1921 in Atlantic City to extend the Labor Day tourist season, it was all white. It would remain that way for almost 50 years, until 1970, when the first Black woman, Cheryl Browne, competed in the pageant, two years after the first-ever Miss Black America pageant was launched.
Lencola Sullivan became the first to place among the top five in the 1980 Miss America pageant. Three years later, Williams famously became the first Black woman to win the crown.
For generations, Black women have had to navigate beauty and professional standards that treated proximity to whiteness as the ideal, with our hair becoming one of the most persistent battlegrounds. Natural hair has since gone from something deemed unpolished or inappropriate to appearing on red carpets, magazine covers and in boardrooms, new legal protections in some states, and now, rightfully, under the Miss America crown.
But Black women certainly do not need Miss America to tell them their natural hair is beautiful. What has changed is the institution bestowing the crown.
Miss America went from excluding Black women entirely to allowing them to compete, crowning its first Black winner, crowning nine more, and now, more than a century after the competition began, choosing a Black woman who decided she could wear her natural hair and look the part.
Hutsell is not the only Black woman challenging and redefining beauty standards for winners of America’s biggest beauty pageants. Less than two weeks before her win, 31-year-old Justus Kelley, who is Black, was crowned Miss USA 2026, making history as the competition’s first married winner, first mother to win, and first winner in her 30s. To be clear, all three of those attributes would have left Kelley ineligible for the title just a few years ago, before Miss USA began allowing married women and mothers to compete in 2023 and later eliminated its upper age limit.
During the final question of the competition, Kelley’s response highlighted the significance of those changes, arguing that women should not have to choose between ambitious careers, families and pursuing their dreams. Then she won.
Just days apart, America’s two largest beauty pageants both sent the same message to the country and the world: The ideal American woman is like nothing we have seen before.
Pageants like Miss America have spent generations attempting to package and sell an idealized version of American womanhood, one that has evolved over the years from physical beauty and poise to include ambition, talent, community service, leadership and a genuine sense of purpose. Still, the woman wearing the Miss America crown, in some sense, is being held up as an answer to the question of what an exemplary American woman looks like.
In 2026, that answer looks like Hutsell. It also looks like Kelley. After generations of Black women pushing against the narrow boundaries of beauty, femininity, ambition, respectability, and even who gets to be considered representative of America in the first place, the most fascinating aspect of these wins is that Black women have been chosen — at least, right now — to represent the ideal.
But step outside the pageant world and you will find that being a Black woman in America in 2026 can be a harrowing experience. Black women have been disproportionately pushed out of jobs, diversity programs meant to address longstanding inequities are being dismantled, and natural hair discrimination remains real enough that advocates are still fighting for legal protections against it.
Meanwhile, some of the country’s most visible Black women have spent the year facing attacks that strike directly at their race and womanhood, from Michelle Obama once again being subjected to the racist and transphobic lie that she is a man to a pregnant Rep. LaMonica McIver facing federal prosecution while far-right activist Laura Loomer publicly hurled racist and misogynistic slurs at her and other Black women.
It all makes for a really strange contradiction, no? At a moment when Black women are being reminded in very real ways that jobs, authority, femininity, and even our right to simply show up as ourselves are up for debate, two institutions that spent decades being criticized for excluding us and perpetuating some of the narrowest ideas about what women should look like are now holding Black women up as their ideal.
There’s still plenty about the pageant world worth interrogating, but who would have thought the beauty pageants in 2026 might be the ones waiting for the rest of America to catch up?
During the competition, Hutsell was asked what she wanted her win to leave for young women who would follow. “Hope,” she said.
“I stand on this stage today, hoping to be a voice of hope for this nation,” she said. “I am living proof that you can go for dreams that people tell you you can’t accomplish. You can stand on the other side with two feet and use your voice to be proud. I hope to encourage Americans everywhere to use their voice and to never let anybody stop them or hold them back from their dreams.”
