Beauty contestants in Los Angeles, sometime around 1955. Writer and collector Jim Linderman shared this photo. There were black beauty contests as early as the 1920s, but they really caught fire in the 1950s (especially since the most prestigious pageant at the time, Miss America, had their infamous “Rule #7” which plainly stated that “contestants had to be of good health and of the white race.” Anyway… the young woman third from the left is Jeanna Limyou. I recognized her right away from the December 1955 cover of Ebony magazine. Many of my Facebook fans have pointed out that she is on Facebook today and her real name is Gina Davis (she was once married to Dodgers player Willie Davis, who died in 2010). She was a popular starlet with Johnson publications in those days and appeared on the covers of JET and HUE magazines numerous times.