New Miss Sonoma aims high

Tyler-Avery Lewis will sing through her reign, and push for schools to be truthful about the African-American experience.|

Tyler-Avery Lewis wasn’t born with a silver crown on her head.

She grew up in a blue-collar, African-American family in Rohnert Park, regularly reminded by the looks and treatment she drew that she was different.

“I was teased a lot because I’m always the darkest kid in school,” said Lewis, now 22 and a student at Santa Rosa Junior College.

In high school, a boy’s constant bullying and harassment drove her over the edge. “He just wouldn’t leave me alone,” she said. At 17, she tried to end her life. The attempt failed and she resolved to find something to live for.

“Dance is what saved me,” Lewis said. “I decided that if I was going to be alive, I needed a purpose.”

She has studied and practiced dance since she was 3½ years old, but the past five years she’s has danced as if her life depended on it. The high school harassment didn’t stop, she said, “I just had more stuff to put myself into.”

Today, dance is Lewis’ professional focus. She studies and trains at the JC under Casandra Hillman and aspires to one day operate her own studio.

When she walked onto the stage at Rohnert Park’s Spreckels Performing Arts Center earlier this month as a contestant in the 2018 Miss Sonoma County judging, anyone aware of her creative passion might have assumed she would dance. She didn’t, for a couple of reasons.

She’d been preparing to perform in the American College Dance Association Festival at Arizona State University, and sought to limit the risk of injuring herself.

And she wanted to sing, to dedicate a song to her father, James Cary Lewis Jr., an Etta James fan right up to his death one year ago. The New Orleans-reared Army veteran’s daughter stepped to the microphone at the Spreckels Performing Arts Center and broke into a rendition of “At Last.”

The audience and judges went wild. A short time later, Tyler-Avery Lewis was crowned the new Miss Sonoma County.

To wear the crown and sash and begin making public appearances as something of a local princess “is kind of like a dream,” she said. “I’m excited about being the face of Sonoma County.”

As part of competing for the title, Lewis had to choose a platform, an issue that as Miss Sonoma County, a potential stepping stone to Miss California and Miss America, she would work to resolve. She told the SRJC newspaper, The Oak Leaf, “I started out choosing bullying as my platform topic,” but changed her mind.

A great-granddaughter of slaves, she decided she’d have a better shot at bringing positive change to the entire community if she’d advocate for factual portrayals of African-Americans in school curricula and textbooks.

Lewis tells of finding that every account she read in school of slaves and black Americans failed to tell the unvarnished and complete truth.

“We were not here willingly,” she said.

“I don’t know why you can’t just tell the truth about slavery in America. A lot of people want to push back and just pretend it didn’t happen.”

Lewis intends to speak to school district officials in Santa Rosa and Cotati-Rohnert Park about looking more critically at how the story of the nation’s blacks and other minorities is told, and to devise ways to address the shortcomings.

She also wants to see more African-Americans appear in the literature presented to students.

Lewis said it seems to her that greater honesty and fairness can help break down the stubborn barriers that divide Americans.

“I felt like I was bullied,” she said, “because people didn’t understand me.”

The new Miss Sonoma County, the third African-American to hold the title, doesn’t see herself remaining in California indefinitely. All her life, she has spent time with family in Louisiana, and she finds herself yearning to live there.

“In Louisiana, I don’t feel like I’m the odd one out,” she said. “Here, I hope to see someone like me and most of the time I don’t.”

Lewis anticipates a busy year. In addition to frequent public appearances and championing her platform for more truthful accounts in public education of the experiences of nonwhite people, she will compete for Miss California.

And she’ll perform. She said, “This year will probably be the year I sing the most.”

At last.

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