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First White & Black Joint Prom in a town in Georgia?
I thought this was a joke at first. I didn't realize this still goes on in the US.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18034102/?GT1=9246 ASHBURN, Ga. - Breaking from tradition, high school students in this small town are getting together for this year’s prom. Prom night at Turner County High has long been an evening of de facto segregation: white students organized their own unofficial prom, while black students did the same. This year’s group of seniors didn’t want that legacy. When the four senior class officers — two whites and two blacks — met with Principal Chad Stone at the start of the school year, they had more on their minds than changes to the school’s dress code. They wanted an all-school prom. They wanted everyone invited. On April 21, they’ll have their wish. The town’s auditorium will be transformed into a tropical scene, and for the first time, every junior and senior, regardless of race, will be invited. The prom’s theme: Breakaway. “Everybody says that’s just how it’s always been. It’s just the way of this very small town,” said James Hall, a 17-year-old black student who is the senior class president. “But it’s time for a change.” There are excited announcements of the upcoming dance plastered all over the school, where about 55 percent of students are black and most of the rest are white. A makeshift countdown to the prom is displayed as a cardboard cutout on a main hallway. Student council members canvass the hallways, asking students to buy a $25 ticket and be a part of history. In the cafeteria, images of palm trees and waterfalls brighten up the sterile walls. “The First Ever!” a poster exclaims. “Got your haircut?” Difficult task Students say the self-segregation that splits social circles in school mirrors the attitude of this town of 4,000 people. So getting every student to break from the past could be a difficult task. With prom night about two weeks away, only half of the 160 upper-class students have bought tickets. And there’s talk around the school that some white students might throw a competing party at a nearby lake. “Everyone is saying they’re not going to the school prom,” said Steven Tuller, a 17-year-old white junior who doesn’t plan to attend either event because he wants to wait until he’s a senior. “They’re saying it’s tradition.” Yet Turner County High already has defied tradition this year. The school abandoned its practice of naming separate white and black homecoming queens. Instead, a mixed-race student was named the county’s first solo homecoming queen. 'Life's got to move on' Some alumni welcome change at Turner County High. “People still think of how life was 20, 30 years ago,” said Keith Massey, a 1990 graduate who now runs the popular Keith-A-Que restaurant in town, about 75 miles south of Macon. “And life’s got to move on.” Massey recalls an attempt to integrate one of the prom parties when he was in school, but few whites showed up. Attempts to organize a school-wide prom in recent years failed because of a lack of student support. Stone, serving his first year as the school’s principal, has been enthusiastic about an integrated prom. He’s funneling $5,000 of his meager discretionary fund to hire a DJ and buy decorations, and he’s persuaded a photographer to set up shop at the civic center to snap photos of the couples before the dance. “This senior class is a close-knit group from top to bottom, and they want to do what’s right,” said Stone, who is white. “They wanted a full school prom. And I told them if they would do it, I’d do them right.” |
Good for the senior class.
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Agreed 100%, I guess I just find it so very strange that there are still places left like this in the USA. Don't get me wrong, I realize there is still racism in the US, but I thought this sort of thing at Public Schools had at least been stamped out. |
Which one did the interracial couples go to before this?
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I remember a certain poster from Georiga on this board criticizing the racial intolerance of the northeast. I couldn't believe what was reading.
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My thoughts exactly. That would be quite the legacy to establish in highschool. |
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I'm not familiar with Turner County, but as I expected, my first guess as to the catalyst for this was dead-on balls accurate.
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I'm not sure what the correlation is between football results and the integration of the prom. OK, I see that the football team is winning a lot more games now, but I'm not seeing why that would affect the prom.
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I assume SD is suggesting there is a correlation between the number of black football players on recent teams and the grudging acceptance by whites of the black community as a necessary by-product of having a sucessful high school football program? If that's not the intimation, I'm not quite sure what he's getting at either. |
I think the message is that the country would be more integrated and racism would be a thing of the past if only black people were better at football.
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LOL |
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I only say it that way because when I was in high school in Georgia, in a very white area, and we had a very good football team one year that was undone by the fact that the star (and pretty much lone black) player on the team was ruled ineligible after the season, it probably set back race relations about 15 years. Although the kids, in general, weren't the problem, of course. It was the adults. |
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And I thought I'd never live to see the day that SkyDog brought Chuck Norris into a thread... :D |
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I think that was the point as well. Whites accepting blacks far more because of the need for the "black athlete" (to use a turn of phrase from "Friday Night Lights" - the book) on the football team. |
The obligatory, I first thought this was a thread about black on white porn in Georgia finally being legal.
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When are the effin rednecks in the south gonna turn into full time humans? I can't believe it took us till today to read something like this. I can't believe it's news at all. Good for the schools, great for the students. They got balls and I salute them all.
Sherman should have done a couple laps in that state. Looks like there were some idiots left to breed. |
In before the lock
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Sometimes I wish the Civil War was a stalemate, with the compromise being Slavery ended, the free blacks could go anywhere else in the country if they so chose, and the confederacy gained it's independence. |
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that should be interesting. maybe my first ban in 8 years too! nummy. |
I'm amazed at the press this story has been getting this week, since I'm almost positive that this is at least the second time around for this "news".
Hopefully this will ring a bell to SD or one of the other Georgian's on the board (since they're the likeliest to have heard what I'm talking about). I'm thinking sometime in the past 3-5 years this same school (that's the part I'm not 100% certain of right now) tried to have a joint prom but failed when the students rejected the notion & chose to attend only the single-race prom (can't remember whether the joint effort was ultimately scrapped or went forward with hardly anybody there). The kids were interviewed by various media outlets & nearly all of them, black or white had pretty much the same general take on things -- we don't like the same music, we don't like the same food, we don't want to have the prom(s) in the same place, why on earth would we stop doing something we enjoy in order to do something that we won't enjoy? Apparently something has changed from then until now, but at the time I was rather impressed by the way that the kids handled the attention they were getting. They spoke their minds, they appeared honest & sincere about their reasons, and they generally felt like it was their business not everybody else's. If the mood/climate/attitude/whatever has changed since then, that's fine. But darned if I see any problem with the decision being theirs, whatever they decided to do, then or now. (Worth highlighting, so that it isn't missed, that the prom(s) are private affairs & are not organized by the school system - that was a point that was frequently made the first time this was in the news, that there was no real school involvement in the planning beyond allowing the group(s) to promote their event on campus) |
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Oh, if only ... :( |
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that wouldn't have been a stalemate then would it? I'm thinking that Lincoln would have considered independence a failure (as I always thought slavery was second to secession in his eyes). |
I definitely remember a thread on here a year or 4 back about a multi-racial prom.
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I doubt that single outburst, however completely idiotic it was, would do it. But seriously, what part of the phrase "self-segregation" do you not understand? This isn't a case of anybody being locked out of anything, or unwelcome (indeed there were a few crossover attendees at each prom IIRC from the first time this story went around), this is about people with common interests choosing to have an event together. I grew up in a town that was about 98% white, or at least the high school was. But I can promise you that our black students weren't too blown away with the band playing covers of The Little River Band at the prom. By the same token, I would have been one of very few whites who would have enjoyed hearing The Gap Band either. (Yeah, I know. I'm old. Tough). If the raw numbers could have supported it financially, I'd say there's a very good chance that there would have been interest in separate proms there too. And damned if I see the harm in that, if it made for a more enjoyable event for everybody. |
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Sounds right, easy (for me at least) to mix those two locations. They're both in an area that's further south than I go for anything other than football or heading to Florida ;) |
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I will never forget looking at the high school yearbook of the mother of one of my black classmates, and noticing that everyone was black. This was in 1971. It just kinda hit me that in 1971, this particular area was still segregated. Not just that racism still existed, etc., but that they hadn't even done a damn thing to comply with Brown v. Board of Education 17 years earlier. It blew my mind. |
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Just another member of the Fof idiot list. I understand self-segregation. I also can say that when I hear about such practices, it usually comes from the south. Hence, my Sherman comment. I think self-segregation is lame and wrong. Seems like a bullshit ideology that has been fostered by races growing up over generations IN THE SOUTH. |
dola:
and yes, i realize that metropolitan areas in the north are prone to issues similar to these. |
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But that's the South's fault too I guess. :rolleyes: It's a pity that you don't seem to have figured out that "equal" does not mean "identical". Or maybe we should just force a percentage of blacks to go to country bars on Friday night & a percentage of whites to go to a hip-hop club, to whatever degree needed to mirror the local demographic split. |
I came to Georgia in 1994 as an 18-year old Swede who had never been to the United States, and who's only image of the USA was from Hollywood movies. Imagine the culture-shock for a scrawny white cityboy arriving in the deep rural south :).
During my years in Tifton, I made many great friends, both black and white. However, the segration was very noticeable... I think perhaps more so for an outsider than for an "insider", because the general feeling was that just as Jon said, it was a case of "self-segration". People didn't dislike eachother, at least not "openly", but they didn't hang out together either. In the dining-hall, whites sat on one side and blacks on the other.. in between was a line, usually made up of international students. Friends across the line weren't unheard of, but they weren't common either. You simply didn't see blacks and whites hang out together. To be honest, there were more "international" blacks making white friends than I saw American blacks and whites hanging out together. In school-activities, and I worked as part of the newspaper staff, but also had a lot of contact with most school-organizations, in blacks in general didn't seem to take part in the same things as whites. I think this also has to do with what Jon said.. they simply didn't share the same interests. Well.. come to think of it, watching Ricki Lake did seem to cross borders :D. For what it's worth, I roomed with a 7-foot black guy and we got along just great.. he was a basketballer but he wasn't from the US, he was from Nigeria. Eh.. this post is probably quite incoherent.. but what the hell.. I just wanted to say that as an outsider coming to the deep south, I was made quite aware of the fact that there still was/is considerable segregation, but that I completely agree with Jon in that it's often self-segregation, chosen by the people themselves. I'd also like to point out that there were definately people "crossing racial boundaries" and that what I'm describing is in part a generalization. |
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The south has a lot more to answer for. I won't burden it with that particular blame. :rolleyes: I'll bring it back to the orig post. I think it's a shame that stuff like this is 'news'. There are volumes and VOLUMES of instances where segregation (self or forced) has reared its head. This is an extension of that way of thinking that doesn't seem right or human to me. |
Hurst,
I don't even know how to respond to your absurd and outrageous statements. As you've said, you're taking one extreme situation in the South (which as you seem to be admitting, is not something forced on blacks by whites) and using it to pain this ridiculous picture of the South, and Georgia in particularly. You yourself admitted that there are outrageous things in the North/midwest also. So why not take one of those stories to paint your broad stroke? I mean seriously. Back out now. I've never had a bad opinion of you, but it you are quickly headed that way. |
The black kids will probably pine for re-segregation of the prom once they see the white kids take the dance floor.
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Your opinion of me isn't a concern of mine. Really, it's a fricken forum. I won't back out now because I still don't understand why something like this has to be news. It's sad. It pisses me off that people have been brought up to 'self-segregate'. I'm sorry if I'm adding to the already unfavorable painting of the south. Am I the only one who thinks that a prom that is breaking barriers by being mixed is a 'well duh!' issue? Maybe it's because proms in the upper midwest are school sanctioned. Maybe it's because I couldn't ever dream of having a segregated prom. I still feel that self-segregation is a product of generational views. It's not quarantined to 1 part of the country but I'm more aware of the south's history with such issues. So keep it coming fellas. I can eat crow. I'm not afraid to be called out. So far, I won't be getting an xmas card from somebody in GA and VA. Anybody else from down there care to step up? ;) |
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You are amazed? Last month here in So Cal the news was that some fat ass chick found out she was 9 months pregnant... |
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What the hell is this, Jon-finds-out-stuff-about-Coder-he-didn't-know- Week? Okay, I had a pretty good idea you were a white cityboy, but other than that ... ;) |
As far as I'm concerned, any sentence that features the word "prom" stops containing anything worth getting upset about roughly 5 seconds after high school ends.
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Man, if I were going to that school during that time people and it had seperate proms, that would suck because if your school had 500 people graduating with those percentages, I would be 1 of 10 people going to my Black prom. That would suck. Especially if there were more males than females. |
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Nah, 'cause it didn't/couldn't happen because the raw numbers weren't big enough to make it feasible. My graduating class was only like 106 people or something to give you some idea of the size of the school. But if you extrapolate it over some of the new mega-schools, with over 1000 Seniors & maybe 1200 juniors, shift the percentage just a little from like 98 to even 95 and you've got 2200 x .05 = 110 people which is probably as many as went to our prom back in the day. |
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Its weird to me how different of an experience others have growing up than I did. I am pretty much the complete opposite of this at least for my early years. I was born in Decatur, and lived in the Atlanta City limits, just north of Forest Park in the 70s and early 80s. In my school, I was one of two white students in the entire school. I guess I grew up with friends of different skin color, and it never seemed a big deal to me. I have always told people that growing up in metro Atlanta was quite different than growing up in rural Georgia, but articles like this just reinforce that for me. My significant other is hispanic, I hate country music, don't like deep fried greens and don't have a southern drawl. (All of which seem to be stereotypes people I am friends with now wonder about me) |
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Oddly enough, so did the people you went to school with ;) And, even more oddly, so did I. Maybe there's something else in play here though. Up until about age 17, my activities with friends were pretty well segmented. There were people I played ball with, other people I saw movies with, other people I played tabletop games with, other people I talked pro wrestling with, etc. Very few people were in more than one of those segments. From about 18 to maybe 24 or so, there was more of a "core group" but even within that things were pretty compartmentalized, just a few more people who were multi-compartment. Thinking back on those years, I'm pretty sure that this was the case for the majority of people I knew. I can remember too many different cliques that changed membership depending upon the scenario for there not to have been some significant similarities to my own pattern. So for, in this case, people who have different ideas about what they want in a prom (or at least in the case I referenced from a few years back) doesn't seem the least bit unusual to me. Is this compartmentalization not what other people experienced/remember? |
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It isn't what I experienced, but my class (just over 100) was fairly unique (so I've been told). We didn't really have different groups and pretty much everyone hung out with everyone else. Some people were more interested in some things over others, but it was a fairly open class. |
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And how is it not news? Many people would say that it is a positive change that these kids are mixing their proms. How is it not news that something generally positive is happening, and it's being advanced by teenagers (who usually don't get much credit for doing something responsible)? Anyway, the way your initial comment came out, it's as if you've just got some kind of issue with the south and its "effin rednecks", and you found a place to go off about it. Even as you try to defend yourself in the post I quoted, you take another jab at the south in your last two sentences. Perhaps I'm wrong, but it reads like you're just baiting southern people into an argument. To be honest, I'm not sure if I'm just falling for it or not. Then again, being from New Orleans originally, I'm not even sure if I'm from "the south" as most people know it. New Orleans is a completely different place altogether. |
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I concur with Skydog, only from a white boy perspective. Although we did kick it freestyle and beat box. |
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All of this is pretty much true for me (well, except replace freestyling with linedancing and a few other corrections ;) )... But really, what I mean is that I had a couple of key activities that had some pretty dramatically different groups of people in those activities.. But, at the core, I had a small group of friends that I did a majority of my activities with, except for the one Varsity sport I participated in - they were not a part of that. But the core of friends I played pickup sports with, played video games with, went out to the movies or whatever with, etc... there was a small core (and I mean like 4 guys and to a lesser extent whomever their g/f's were at the team) that were generally together for most activities... Of which, 3 of those guys will be the groomsmen in my wedding... (for fair disclosure though, one of them [lordscarlet] is my twin brother which is unique for me compared to most (all?) of you)... |
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