Miss Louisiana Holli' Conway came home Monday after a stellar run at the Miss America 2019 competition.
Miss New York Nia Franklin took the national title. Miss Connecticut Bridget Oei was first runner up, Conway was second runner up. Miss Florida Taylor Tyson was third runner up, and Miss Massachusetts Gabriela Taveras was fourth runner up.
This was the first year the scholarship contest was revamped as Miss America 2.0. The swimsuit competition was dropped. Instead, the program focused on empowering women.
Conway said everyone asks about how the changes were different, but none of the contestants had been to Miss America before, so they didn't know what to expect beyond what they'd seen in the past.
She said the class was resilient and ready for change, and they showed it.
In lieu of swimsuit, the Top 15 asked their peers questions they'd written. Each had 30 seconds to answer. Conway said they were really encouraging to each other, and the question each woman wrote was tied to her passions.
"These girls are geniuses. Harvard grads. Brown grads, you know. Performers already in their careers and women who started their own businesses already, so I think we represented Miss America 2.0 pretty well," she said.
Conway was named Thursday's preliminary talent winner for her vocal performance of Fantasia's "I Believe."
Conway's personal platform, InspHIGHER, is a motivational program that guides men, women and children as they strive to reach their highest aptitudes. She referenced it several times during the pageant finals on Sunday night.
On Monday, she said she thought she'd done a good job of encouraging others and spreading her platform. Representation is why she started competing in the Miss Louisiana Organization and why she came back after a year off.
Many comments about Conway on Twitter during the pageant were praising her for competing with her natural hair texture.
She said she competes so girls who look like her and little athletes and theater geeks can see someone succeeding.
"Three of the (Top) five were black girls," she said, "and that made me very, very happy. That was actually a dream I had right before finals. I said, "Oh, my goodness, I wonder what it would look like if the majority was black.' Because you just don't see that."
Black women were allowed to start competing in Miss America in the 1970s. Conway said she was looking at the history of the pageant with some of the other contestants and realized they still consider it an accomplishment to have eight black girls on the stage.
"Eight — out of 51, but it's been almost 50 years since black girls could compete," she said. "So, representation is so important. I want girls to know that they can be involved so that the excuse of not having enough black girls make it that far is not because they don't compete. So we're all on an equal playing field."
Conway said she got along with all her pageant class and genuinely loved them all.
So what do people most often misunderstand about competing?
"It's a unique experience," Conway said. "I will say this on behalf of my sister. Know that they're humans. I've watched the Miss America pageant quite a few times, and it almost seems like they're untouchable entities or they're so big because they're on TV, but they they're humans, and you meet them and then you start to see the backlash that they get from certain things, and you start to think 'Oh, my goodness, that's my friend. That's my friend.' And we forget that sometimes. ...
"With fame comes those things, but we have to remember that we're all people and we all have our differing opinions. We have to remember it's not always just right and wrong. Sometimes, it's just different."
On Thursday, she'll host the Miss Northwestern Lady of the Bracelet competition, the event that drew her into pageant competition, and she looks forward to a year of spreading the InspHIGHER message across the state.
After her reign, Conway plans to move to New York City and pursue her Broadway dreams.
