Morrilton native Lencola Sullivan-Verseveldt is surprised that something she did 26 years ago still has the impact it has today.
“I was just trying to earn scholarship money to get to school and ended up making history,” says the first black winner of the Miss Arkansas pageant.
And, too, she was angry.
That’s what helped her win the pageant in the first place — “being angry about something,” she says: The “something” was the negative perception about Arkansas harbored by nonresidents.
Brubaker didn’t help matters. The 1980 Robert Redford movie, about a warden’s quest to clean up extreme corruption at an Arkansas prison farm, got Sullivan-Verseveldt wondering what she could do to tear down the stereotypes about her home state. “That became my mission,” she says.
She feels that winning the title “really did help. And it did so many other things that I never dreamed it would do.” Like becoming one of the first black women, along with Miss Washington, Doris Janell Hayes, to win a preliminary award at the 1980 Miss America pageant. Like becoming fourth runner-up to Miss America and the first black contestant to place among the Top Five in the pageant.
Like earning her a spot in the 2006 Arkansas Black Hall of Fame.
Sullivan-Verseveldt says she is “extremely honored” to be chosen to be inducted at the 14 th annual induction ceremony, Saturday at the Statehouse Convention Center.
Other inductees are: Oliver Baker, endowed professor of physics at Hampton University, a staff physicist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and researcher of elementary particles and nuclei. Glenn Johnson, the second black to serve on the Illinois Appellate Court. Emma Kelly Rhodes, a high school dropout and mother of seven who earned her General Education Development diploma as a widowed 24-year-old, then went on to earn a doctorate and serve as coordinator of the state’s adult education program.
Henry Shead, a musician whose talents led to his work with such entertainers as Dinah Shore, Johnny Carson and Jerry Lewis. The late Charles Bussey, the first black mayor of Little Rock and the first black to serve on the city’s board of directors since Reconstruction.
When Sullivan-Verseveldt saw the list of past Arkansas Black Hall of Fame winners, she “was blown away by the caliber of people that were inducted.” Sullivan-Verseveldt now lives in Zoetermeer in the Netherlands with her husband, Roel P. Verseveldt.
But one of the requirements for inductees is that they make a positive impact on their state, their country and their world, and she did so... long after her year as Miss Arkansas.
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