Georgia High School To Hold First Ever Integrated Prom
File this one under what the heck took you so long:
MACON, Ga. –Students at one south Georgia high school share classrooms and sports fields; but, they don’t share the same prom.
The school holds one prom for white students and another for students of color.
“We’re embarrassed, it’s embarrassing, yeah it’s kind of embarrassing,” said student Stephanie Sinnot.
Stephanie and three other friends say they do everything together, except go to prom.
“We are all friends. That’s just kind of not right that we can’t go to prom together,” said student Keela Bloodworth.
In a world full of color, Wilcox County High School still sees things as black and white.
“There’s a white prom and then we have our integrated prom,” said Bloodworth.
The girls said if any race other than Caucasian tries to attend the white prom, that student would probably be escorted off the premises by police. That was the case last year when a biracial student was turned away by police.
It’s been that way for as long as anyone can remember; and, it doesn’t stop at prom.
Homecoming is also segregated.
(….)
While having two separate dances, the school decided to elect only one pair for Homecoming king and queen for the first time this year.
Quanesha Wallace won.
“I felt like there had to be a change because for me to be a black person and the king to be a white person, I felt like, you know why can’t we come together,” asked Quanesha Wallace.
But nothing changed. Quanesha wasn’t invited to the white Homecoming dance. In fact, the pair took separate photos for the school yearbook.
“When people around here are set in their ways, they are not too adamant to change,” said student Mareshia Rucker.
So the girls decided to take matters into their own hands. They’re organizing a prom for everyone to attend. But, not everyone is fond of the idea.
Some of the posters for the integrated prom that were hung up have been ripped to the ground.
Progress still comes in baby steps, it seems.
I went to a small high school in rural Alabama. My junior prom was 30 years ago. It was integrated and had been for quite some time. This is truly bizarre.
@James Joyner:
Every now and then you see stories like this pop up about some HS in some rural part of the rural Deep South where this still happens. But, yea, it’s bizarre
Several years back, Morgan Freeman was a subject of a documentary about segregated proms back in his hometown and how he would fund the prom if it was integrated.
Truly bizarre this is still becoming a new thing in some parts of the nation.
Divide these United States evenly via the Cartesian coordinate method using the x and y axis.
For the area defined by X>0 and y<0, kindly have them leave the union.
If you are unsure of what I am saying, chances are you are from there.
I guess it is the time of year for the segregated prom/high school graduation/graduation party story. The media seems to look around every year for one of the stories. Of course, the clip you posted failed to note that the high school does not actually sponsor a prom and that both proms are office campus and private.
Of course, the media elite just solves the issue by sending their own children to private prep schools that are overwhelmingly white and have few, if any, blacks.
Yea, can’t figure kids still being segregated in the 21st century. Especially seeing as how conservatives are constantly reminding them that the President is a ni**ger. Does not make sense.
@superdestroyer: I actually think you have a good point. Especially about all the lily white liberals who have no conception of non-white people outside of the media. I was at a meeting with the ACLU national president recently and it struck me that everyone there was well-off, elderly, and white, and this was in a largely black, Democratic town. Not a single “person of color” – only us colorless folks. However, the story is not really clear about whether these proms are private or not.
That being said, I am from the Deep South and have traveled to all of its distant corners. This is not common, and indeed, even the students at the school by and large no doubt find the anachronism shameful. I’ve been to towns much, much smaller and more provincial than Macon and everything everywhere is pretty much integrated in the modern Deep South except for church and the private schools the rich white folks send their kids to in the states north of my own.
We tried that once. But now the South is becoming the heart of industry and culture in our nation, so looks like we’re winning a soft victory.
@superdestroyer: Still smarting over the fact you couldn’t get a date to your prom, eh SuperDense? Guess those white power tattoos aren’t quite the lady charmers you thought they’d be…
@aFloridian: “But now the South is becoming the heart of industry and culture in our nation, so looks like we’re winning a soft victory. ”
Excuse me? Seriously? Granted, the ability to screw over workers has brought a few companies to build plants in the South, but the heart of industry? And of culture? Aside from Chik-Fil-A and Jeebus movies with the kid from Growing Pains, what the heck are you talking about?
@wr:
Remember when progressives were mocking the South for producing most of the energy in the U.S and uses the most energy. The south is the location where corporations are willing to build factories these days unlike the northern cities where the residents believe that industrial production, energy production, and actually manufacturing should be done somewhere else by somebody else.
Why do progressives believe that the U.S. can support the dense living of NYC with solar panels and wind mills?
@aFloridian:
I always find it odd that the prep school, Ivy League progressives mock the south without any idea of who white students function in small town southern high schools that are either majority black or almost majority black. There was the story a couple of years ago about the Mississippi high school where the white student do not bother to attend the graduation ceremony because it was dominated by the behavior of the black parents.
Just like the segregated prom story pops up each year, there will be a news report in May or June about a black family evicted from a graduation ceremony or being arrested because the family refuses to follow the rules for decorum at a public high school graduation.
Of course such a foolish and ignorant statement would be made by someone who claims that phantom black families are supposedly being thrown out of graduation ceremonies for being too uppity…
I assume that the classes in American History classes about 1955 – or in other words, “the present”?
I understand that the white prom is put on by the parents. Reminds me of this song from South Pacific written in 1949 (over 60 years ago for crying out loud).
You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
@superdestroyer: “The south is the location where corporations are willing to build factories these days unlike the northern cities ”
Yes, because in the grand tradition of the slave labor they endorse, they’ve passed laws wiping out essentially all protections for workers, slashed pay and benefits and guaranteed that the corporations can steal as much as they want from their employees in the name of “freedom.”
You keep screaming about how we’re turning into a third world country because we let them dark people in. The fact is we’re turning into a third world country because we’re establishing a political and economic system of the superrich on top and extreme poverty for everyone else.
Why you, someone who is clearly not destined to hit the one percent, is so eager to join the impoverished masses is not clear to me. Except that as long as you can keep feeling superior to the minorities you don’t care how crappy the rest of your life is.
Thanks, but no thanks.
@superdestroyer:
Yeah, tax breaks and unskilled labor make it a desirable location for factories. The racism….not so much.
Being from Florida, I have been in contact with well-to-do Yankee travelers my entire life, and I truly believe that the hidden, condescending racism widespread amongst those from the north is far more insidious than the blatant racism of some in the South, given that it is only practiced by a dying Old Guard. Southerners of the younger generations hardly fit the stereotypes the north loves to paint.
It’s also been my experience that it is principally northerners who suffer from the “white fear” of blacks and other minorities which is so harmful to race relations.