The theme of 2015's Tournament of Roses Parade is “Inspiring Stories,” and the person leading it has a doozy: a tale of racism and redemption from a 57-year-old injustice involving the parade itself.
Riding on the first float in the 126th edition of this New Year's Day tradition, before some 700,000 spectators in Pasadena, Calif. and an estimated 70 million television viewers, will be 82-year-old Joan Williams. She was first slated to ride in the parade in 1958 as Miss Crown City, but later denied the honor because she was African-American.
In 1957, Williams, her husband and two daughters had just moved to Pasadena (about 10 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles), where she worked for the city's Department of Water and Power. She didn't even know there was a Miss Crown City - a Pasadena city employee who appeared at civic ceremonies and rode on the city's Rose Parade float - until her colleagues had nominated her for the position.
Joan Williams holds the portrait from 1957, when she was Miss Crown City. On January 1, 2015, after... [+]
“After wining and dining us and looking us over,” she told me, “I learned that they had chosen me to represent the city in the 1958 parade.”
Williams sat for a portrait – “with a tiara on!” – and was given a list of appearances: department store ribbon cutting, opening of the new Sears and, of course, the Rose Parade.
Then a reporter from a local newspaper went to the Williams home “and met my family, which consisted of my brown-skinned husband and my two little girls.”
As Jet magazine reported, “word spread that light-complexioned Mrs. Williams was a Negro.”
“Within days, it all went downhill,” Ms. Williams says. She was told that, for budgetary reasons, the city had decided not to enter a float in that year's Tournament of Roses Parade.
“The parade happened,” she told me. “I just wasn’t in it.”
On top of that, “People I worked with stopped speaking with me. And it was all because of assumptions that they had made when they nominated me.”
“You can imagine how I felt. I was young, I was excited. I had been watching the parade all my life,” said the Los Angeles native. “It was a wonderful, festive time I thought I would be part of.”
Although Ms. Williams calls the episode “a slap in the face,” she also insists “I didn't dwell on it, and I haven’t dwelt on it.”
But nearly 60 years later, others took action. “Pasadena has a vibrant community, and when they learned of this they were taken aback by it,” Ms. Williams said. She was named 2014 Woman of the Year by a local health organization, and some Pasadena City Council members learned of her story and took action to set things right. “Everything snowballed from that,” culminating in Ms. Williams’ appearance on the first float of the Rose Parade.
The one thing that was missing: an apology from the city.
Until now. Barely an hour before I spoke with Ms. Williams the day before the parade, she told me, “I received a lovely phone call from Mayor [Bill] Bogaard, and a letter arrived with a full apology.”
