Miss USA Asya Branch was set to make history at the Miss Universe Pageant on Sunday. Sadly, Branch did not win the title, but she did make it into the top 20 contestants. The Miss Universe Pageant was held at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Florida. Branch competed against 89 other women at the pageant. Andrea Meza, 26, from Mexico, won the title of Miss Universe. The runner-up was Miss Brazil, Julia Gama.
Branch did, however, already make history a few times. Branch, 23, is the first Black woman to win Miss Mississippi. She is also the first Miss Mississippi to win Miss USA.
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After winning Miss Mississippi, the Bonneville native said that she was honored to be a part of history while acknowledging some hard truths.
“I was so honored to have made history, but at the same time, I thought, ‘Wow, we’re still having firsts,’” said Branch.
Branch also competed in the Miss America Pageant in 2018 and has used her success to discuss criminal justice reform. Her father served 10 years in prison for conspiracy to commit robbery and kidnapping when Branch was 10-years-old. Branch said that her father’s time in prison deeply affected herself and her 7 siblings.
“He was the foundation of our home and our main source of income, so we faced extremely difficult times losing him,” she said. “I think that people forget about the family that’s left behind after a parent or guardian becomes incarcerated. I always say it’s a shared family sentence. My father may have been the one incarcerated, but we suffered as well in the outside world. But I realized that there are so many other people suffering from the same circumstances as myself.
And so that gave me the motivation to really want to be a voice for the unheard and to set an example for other children who may not have had the same mindset and motivation and that parents had given me.”
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Branch has used her platform to begin an initiative called Finding Your Way: Empowering Children of Incarcerated Parents. She also launched an initiative that donates communication resources to incarcerated people. The initiative is aptly named Love Letters and provides inmates with stationary to write to their families.
