1990 Ad

Ebony, Dec, 1989 by Lynn Norment

At age 16, the A student won her high school's Valentine Sweetneart Pageant and was encouraged to enter the Miss Jonesboro Pageant. Despite her age, she placed second and won favorable critiques from the judges. Over the next several years, Debbye took private marimba lessons, got rid of her "baby fat" by exercising diligently, studied makeup and hairstyling techniques in magazines, and improved her communication skills.

She participated in the Miss America Pageant three times--in 1985, 1987 and 1988--and placed first runner-up twice. "Deep down my heart I just knew that this was my destiny," she recalls feeling after losing the third state pageant. "I knew I was supposed to make it to the Miss America Pageant, and the Miss Arkansas Pageant wasn't going to stop me."

By this time, Turner, who has always loved cats, had completed her premed requirements at Arkansas State University and was a veterinary medicine student at the University of Missouri. After much soul-searching, she decided to "defect," as she says, and compete in Missouri, subsequently winning the Miss Missouri title.

"I would not have been ready for Miss America last year, or the year before that," she says. "This was the year to do it, whether it was as Miss Missouri or Miss Arkansas, and I believe in my heart that this is what God had planned."

Consequently, she's ready to deal with criticism from those who feel that beauty pageants are sexist and exploitative. "This pageant can be a positive experience for young women to use as a means to an end, not as an end in itself," she says. "If they can come away from this pageant having built more self-confidence, having honed their talent, having improved their communication skills, and then gain scholarship money in the process, then that's a positive experience, and that's not exploitation. That's not victimization; that's growth."

In the meantime, Turner's love life has been put on hold. She says she'd had the same boyfriend since high school, but broke off the engagement two years ago because she wanted "God to be in control." Her former sweetheart is now a pharmacist in St. Louis and has attended all of her pageants, including Miss America.

As a child, Turner says she loved Barbie dolls and always had just as many Black dolls as White ones. She adds that she was a "curious" and "real talkative" kid whose teachers often wrote comments on her report card such as: "Debbye does excellent work but she talks too much."

Because she continues to be very talkative, she says that some of her comments as Miss America have been distorted and taken out of context, especially her statement of "being Black is the very least of what I am."

"I am black, and I don't have to do an hour-long soliloquy on that to prove it," she says. "But I am many more things than just being Black...I don't want to limit myself to just being Black. My philosophy, because of how I was raised, is to do things because of what i am and not because of what's on the outside.