Anita Bryant

Anita Jane Bryant (March 25, 1940 – December 16, 2024) was an American singer. She had three top 20 hits in the United States in the early 1960s. She was the 1958 Miss Oklahoma beauty pageant second runner up, and a brand ambassador for the Florida Citrus Commission from 1969 to 1980. For a 3-year period in the late 1970s, Bryant was a pro-Christian opponent of gay rights.

From 1977 to 1980, Bryant was an outspoken opponent of gay rights in the United States. In 1977, she ran the Save Our Children campaign to repeal a local ordinance in Miami-Dade County, Florida, that outlawed discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. The campaign resulted in a 69% majority vote to repeal the ordinance in 1977 (which Dade County restored in 1998). Throughout the country, supporters of gay rights condemned Bryant for her campaign. Assisted by prominent figures in music, film, and television, they retaliated by boycotting the orange juice that she promoted and advocating for her to be blacklisted. Her contract with the Florida Citrus Commission ended three years later. This, as well as her later divorce from Bob Green, left her financially insolvent and she filed for bankruptcy twice.

Bryant was born in Barnsdall, Oklahoma, on March 25, 1940, the daughter of Lenora Annice Berry and Warren G. Bryant. After her parents divorced, her father went into the U.S. Army and her mother went to work as a clerk for Tinker Air Force Base. She began singing at the age of 2 at the First Baptist church in Barnsdall, with "Jesus Loves Me". She was singing onstage at the age of six, at local fairgrounds in Oklahoma. She sang occasionally on radio and television, and was invited to audition when Arthur Godfrey's talent show came to town, eventually winning the contest. At age 12, she had her television show The Anita Bryant Show, which aired on WKY (now KFOR-TV).

Bryant became Miss Oklahoma in 1958, after graduating from Tulsa's Will Rogers High School, and was second runner-up in the 1959 Miss America pageant in September 1958.

In 1960, Bryant married Bob Green (1931–2012), a Miami disc jockey, with whom she eventually raised four children. They divorced in 1980.

Biography summary from English Wikipedia, photograph via Wikimedia Commons.