The Winner of Miss America 2019 Is Nia Imani Franklin, Miss New York

On Sunday night, Nia Franklin was crowned Miss America 2019. A classically trained opera singer, Franklin represented New York in the competition, focusing on equal opportunity and education in her interview questions.

“I have New York grit,” Franklin, 25, said during the competition. “As a New Yorker, I understand what it means to work hard.”

Franklin is a graduate of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where she studied music composition. She emphasized, during the competition, that “there is a 20 percent higher graduation rate at schools where music is a part of the curriculum.”

According to her Instagram, she is also a Janelle Monáe and a Lauryn Hill enthusiast.

New York has had seven winners, including Vanessa Williams, who was crowned in 1983, making it the state with the most wins in the organization’s history.

The annual event and its parent organization have undergone a number of changes in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Sunday’s Miss America was the first to suspend a “swimsuit competition” since the first event, in 1921. Miss America has also been rebranded as a competition, rather than a pageant — and yes, they are calling it Miss America 2.0.

These changes followed internal reorganization over the last year. In December, the previous chief executive of the Miss America Organization, Sam Haskell, resigned after vicious and misogynist emails were made public.

With a cleaner house, the organization set out to make a system that did not seem dated, drab or sexist.

The competition Sunday night did have fresh trappings, relevant to the tax-exempt organization’s mission “of empowering young women everywhere to dream big,” according to their website. Participants had platforms that were described as “social impact statements.” These ranged from Miss New Jersey’s Don’t Get Nutty: Food Allergy Awareness program to Miss South Dakota’s Money $heep, a nonprofit that helps young people with financial literacy.

Miss Michigan, Emily Sioma, introduced her state as having “84 percent of the country’s fresh water but with none for its residents to drink,” just as Detroit children were returning to school and being instructed to not drink from water fountains after elevated lead and copper levels were found at 34 schools. (Sioma wore a Black Lives Matter T-shirt in rehearsals.)

Yet not all is cheery at the organization. The outgoing Miss America, Cara Mund, slammed the organization, in a letter that became public this summer. Mund wrote that the Miss America Organization’s chief executive, Regina Hopper, had disparaged her, and that Gretchen Carlson, the chair of the organization’s board of directors and Miss America 1989, had pushed her aside as the organization’s ambassador.

And, unhappy with how they say changes have been made in the last year, including the elimination of the swimsuit competition, many of the state pageant organizations have asked Carlson and Hopper to resign. Eleven former Miss Americas also asked for their resignation.

Now that Mund, the first Miss America from North Dakota, has handed over the crown, she will head to law school. She hopes to become the first female governor of her home state.