If you plan on watching the Rose Bowl Parade tomorrow, please remember the story of Mrs Joan Williams of Los Angeles. I don’t expect the parade announcers to even mention it

Racism And Redemption At The Tournament Of Roses Parade via @forbes

…a tale of racism and redemption from a 57-year-old injustice involving the parade itself.

Riding on the first float in the 126th edition of this New Year’s Day tradition, before some 700,000 spectators in Pasadena, Calif. and an estimated 70 million television viewers, will be 82-year-old Joan Williams. She was first slated to ride in the parade in 1958 as Miss Crown City, but later denied the honor because she was African-American.

In 1957, Williams, her husband and two daughters had just moved to Pasadena (about 10 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles), where she worked for the city’s Department of Water and Power. She didn’t even know there was a Miss Crown City - a Pasadena city employee who appeared at civic ceremonies and rode on the city’s Rose Parade float - until her colleagues had nominated her for the position…

Williams sat for a portrait - “with a tiara on!” - and was given a list of appearances: department store ribbon cutting, opening of the new Sears and, of course, the Rose Parade.

Then a reporter from a local newspaper went to the Williams home “and met my family, which consisted of my brown-skinned husband and my two little girls.”

As Jet magazine reported, “word spread that light-complexioned Mrs. Williams was a Negro.”

“Within days, it all went downhill,” Ms. Williams says. She was told that, for budgetary reasons, the city had decided not to enter a float in that year’s Tournament of Roses Parade.

“The parade happened,” she told me. “I just wasn’t in it.”

On top of that, “People I worked with stopped speaking with me. And it was all because of assumptions that they had made when they nominated me.”

“You can imagine how I felt. I was young, I was excited. I had been watching the parade all my life,” said the Los Angeles native. “It was a wonderful, festive time I thought I would be part of.”

Although Ms. Williams calls the episode “a slap in the face,” she also insists “I didn’t dwell on it, and I haven’t dwelt on it.”…