| After a little more than seven months as the reigning Miss Black North Carolina, Madison Gibbs ’15 took the $3,500 she raised on a crowdfunding website and in the Greensboro community to Washington, D.C. where she competed against 36 women in the Miss Black USA scholarship pageant and won.
“It was a lot more competition this time. We had preliminaries on Friday and Saturday where everyone competed for a Top 16 spot to be eligible to compete on Sunday,” Gibbs said.
This pageant was a big change from the four she competed in before. Her campaigns for Miss Dudley High School, Miss A&T, Miss Black Greensboro and Miss Black North Carolina were all one day and “straight to the point.”
While she did lack the multiple day pageant experience, she leaned on experiences as a speech communication major at North Carolina A&T State University to help her through the unknown.
“I thought about how A&T prepared me – I see it now more than ever before,” she said. “Campaigning helped me a lot with this. I’ve learned how to talk to people and approach them and having to stretch to do it and not being nervous.”
As the great granddaughter of A&T’s fourth president, W.T. Gibbs, she has said in previous interviews that A&T is “in my blood.” As an undergraduate, Gibbs was a Wabash-Provost Scholar, a National Alumni Scholar, a member of Toastmasters, A&T Mock Trial Society, Model UN, the Student Union Advisory Board, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. and Delta GEMS (Growing and Empowering Myself Successfully).
These days, between classes at Howard University School of Law, she is working to raise awareness about heart disease and reducing the stigma of mental illness through “The Heart Truth” and the “Are you OK?” campaigns, respectively.
Gibbs will spend the next year reaching out to others and will have the opportunity to travel to Ghana in October to walk in a show during fashion week and continue to reach out to her community.
“It means everything to me,” Gibbs said. “It’s possible for anyone to do this. People look at me and think competing and winning something like this is out of their league. I was recruited to compete for Miss Black Greensboro. I told the person that I thought Ms. Black USA was out of my league.”
“You never know what you can do until you try. You really just have to push yourself and work hard and it can happen.”
Send Us Your News
Do you have good news to share? Have you recently received a promotion or special recognition? If you’d like to be considered for a future story, click here. |
