SEGREGATED PROM IN 2009?

A bunch of high-school seniors waited out the final weeks of school they begin rightfully to revel in the shared thrill of moving on. It is no different in south-central Georgia’s Montgomery County, made up of a few small towns set between fields of wire grass and sweet onion. The music is turned up. Homework languishes. The future looms large. But for the 54 students in the class of 2009 at Montgomery County High School, so, too, does the past. On May 1 — a balmy Friday evening — the white students held their senior prom. And the following night — a balmy Saturday — the black students had theirs.
Racially segregated proms have been held in Montgomery County — where about two-thirds of the population is white — almost every year since its schools were integrated in 1971. Such proms are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South.
actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for last year’s first-of-its-kind integrated prom at Charleston High School in Mississippi, his home state, the idea was quickly embraced by students — and rejected by a group of white parents, who held a competing “private” prom.
All students are welcome at the black prom, though generally few if any white students show up. The white prom, students say, remains governed by a largely unspoken set of rules about who may come. Black members of the student council say they have asked school administrators about holding a single school-sponsored prom, but that, along with efforts to collaborate with white prom planners, has failed. According to Timothy Wiggs, the outgoing student council president and one of 21 black students graduating this year, “We just never get anywhere with it.”
Students of both races say that interracial friendships are common at Montgomery County High School. Black and white students also date one another, though often out of sight of judgmental parents. “Most of the students do want to have a prom together,” says Terra Fountain, a white 18-year-old who graduated from Montgomery County High School last year and is now living with her black boyfriend. “But it’s the white parents who say no. … They’re like, if you’re going with the black people, I’m not going to pay for it.”
The night of the "white prom" a few of the black teenagers gathered in KFC, "I feel bad for them! Their prom is lame!”. They puzzled merrily over white girls’ devotion both to tanning beds “You don’t like black people, but you’re working your hardest to get as brown as I am!” and also to the very boys who were excluded from the dance “Half of those girls, when they get home, they’re gonna text a black boy!” NY TIMES MAY 21ST 2009

*my thing is...these kids are old enough to smoke, drive, have intercourse with whomever they please, why not step up to the plate and help do something about it, raise voices seeing that the black voices are not enough....but it's something that has been going on for 30 yrs since the intergration in the 70's....obviously these white kids in Georgia do not care enough or just really do not want a mixed prom??
It's a crazy situation, but we are in a country that enslaved a culture of people for over 400yrs, so how surprised can we be!
WHAT IS UR VOICE?