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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIn Abbeville GA, the first integrated prom is being held this weekend
Here's the follow up to the story about the four girls at Wilcox High who were determined to change the practice of holding segregated proms. Heartwarming.
Mareshia Rucker watched in frustration last weekend as several dozen classmates in tuxedos and gowns walked into an Art Deco theater for her high schools white prom.
Like all black students at Wilcox County High School, she was not invited. The rural county in central Georgia is one of the last pockets in the country with racially segregated proms.
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Organized by students, it is open to all, at a ballroom in nearby Cordele. Nearly half of the schools 380 students have registered, with roughly equal numbers of black students and white students.
A group of four female students two black and two white came up with the idea, and they have received an outpouring of support from across the country. Their Facebook group has 24,000 fans, and it has raised enough in donations to rent a ballroom and buy food and gift bags for every couple.
Disc jockeys from Texas and Atlanta volunteered to play music, a motivational speaker from Florida is delivering a speech, and photographers from New York and Savannah are taking pictures, all without cost. In response, the Wilcox County school board plans to vote this spring on making future proms official school events, which would prohibit racial segregation.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/us/in-rural-georgia-students-step-up-to-offer-integrated-prom.html?_r=0
In_The_Wind
(72,300 posts)shenmue
(38,506 posts)Welcome to the 21st Century.
Lucky Luciano
(11,248 posts)Walk away
(9,494 posts)rise above a population of bigots and drag half their student body with them into the modern world. I wonder what the half of Abbeville are doing that night.
lastlib
(23,140 posts)(oh, wait........)
reformist2
(9,841 posts)lastlib
(23,140 posts)I've been on your end, too!
HAND
Cirque du So-What
(25,907 posts)Pressure must be brought to bear on those schools still supporting this reprehensible practice. It will be especially gratifying to see the last of these schools give up the neoconfederate ghost.