About now, high-school seniors everywhereslip into a glorious sort of limbo. Waiting out the final weeks of theschool year, they begin rightfully to revel in the shared thrill ofmoving on. It is no different in south-central Georgia’s MontgomeryCounty, made up of a few small towns set between fields of wire grassand sweet onion.
The music is turned up. Homework languishes. Thefuture looms large. But for the 54 students in the class of 2009 atMontgomery County High School, so, too, does the past. On May 1 — abalmy Friday evening — the white students held their senior prom. Andthe following night — a balmy Saturday — the black students had theirs.Racially segregated proms have been held in Montgomery County — whereabout two-thirds of the population is white — almost every year sinceits schools were integrated in 1971. Such proms are, by many accounts,longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though inrecent years a number of communities have successfully pushed forchange. When the actor Morgan Freemanoffered to pay for last year’s first-of-its-kind integrated prom atCharleston High School in Mississippi, his home state, the idea wasquickly embraced by students — and rejected by a group of whiteparents, who held a competing “private” prom. (The effort is thesubject of a documentary, “Prom Night in Mississippi,” which will beshown on HBO in July.) The senior proms held by Montgomery County HighSchool students — referred to by many students as “the black-folksprom” and “the white-folks prom” — are organized outside school throughstudent committees with the help of parents.