One has to wonder where are the Bill O’Reillys and Sean Hannity’s with their pompous, holier than thou rhetoric now that we see white folks have continued to have segregated proms and other activities which in turn has sparked Black students to hold their opwn events.. mmmm I hear silence.. hahaha Just what I thought
-Davey D-
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A Prom Divided-Whites Only Prom in Georgia
by SARA CORBETT
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24prom-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
About now, high-school seniors everywhere slip into a glorious sort of limbo. Waiting out the final weeks of the school year, 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, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change. When the 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. (The effort is the subject of a documentary, “Prom Night in Mississippi,” which will be shown on HBO in July.) The senior proms held by Montgomery County High School students — referred to by many students as “the black-folks prom” and “the white-folks prom” — are organized outside school through student committees with the help of parents. 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.” Principal Luke Smith says the school has no plans to sponsor a prom, noting that when it did so in 1995, attendance was poor.
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.”
“It’s awkward,” acknowledges JonPaul Edge, a senior who is white. “I have as many black friends as I do white friends. We do everything else together. We hang out. We play sports together. We go to class together. I don’t think anybody at our school is racist.” Trying to explain the continued existence of segregated proms, Edge falls back on the same reasoning offered by a number of white students and their parents. “It’s how it’s always been,” he says. “It’s just a tradition.”
Earlier this month, on the Friday night of the white prom, Kera Nobles, a senior who is black, and six of her black classmates drove over to the local community center where it was being held. Standing amid a crowd of about 80 parents, siblings and grandparents, they snapped pictures and whooped appreciatively as their white friends — blow-dried, boutonniered and glittering in a way that only high-school seniors can — did their “senior walk,” parading in elegant pairs into the prom. “We got stared at a little, being there,” said one black student, “but it wasn’t too bad.”
After the last couple were announced, after they watched the white people’s father-daughter dance and then, along with the other bystanders, were ushered by chaperones out the door, Kera and her friends piled into a nearby KFC to eat. Whatever elation they felt for their dressed-up classmates was quickly wearing off.
“My best friend is white,” said one senior girl, a little glumly. “She’s in there. She’s real cool, but I don’t understand. If they can be in there, why can’t everybody else?”
The seven teenagers — a mix of girls and boys — slowly worked their way through two buckets of fried chicken. They cracked jokes about the white people’s prom (“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”). They mused about whether white parents really believed that by keeping black people out of the prom, it would keep them out of their children’s lives (“You think there aren’t going to be black boys at college?”). And finally, more somberly, they questioned their white friends’ professed helplessness in the face of their parents’ prejudice (“You’re 18 years old! You’re old enough to smoke, drive, do whatever else you want to. Why aren’t you able to step up and say, ‘I want to have my senior prom with the people I’m graduating with?’ ”).
It was getting late now. KFC was closing. Another black teenager was mopping the floor nearby. A couple of the boys mentioned they had to wash their cars in the morning. Kera had an early hair appointment. The next night, they would dress up and dance raucously for four hours before tumbling back outside, one step closer to graduating. In the meantime, a girl named Angel checked her cellphone to see if any of the white kids had texted from inside their prom. They hadn’t. Angel shrugged. “I really don’t understand,” she said. “Because I’m thinking that these people love me and I love them, but I don’t know. Tonight’s a different story.”
Return to Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner
what is REALLY clear to me is that it’s the parents who are pushing the segregation.
And you all think that “hip-hop” has brought white and black people together. As long as “N’ word people degrade one another and white folks can have a place to take their kids to show them how blessed they are not to have to live like black people and a place to go to to buy their drugs, their fine with it. The core values of white America hasn’t changed. HIp-hop is the code word for what Jewish/white people created and its just the listening to of black people denigrating themselves for their listening pleasure. Does it suprise me that in 2009 Proms are segreagated – NOT! HIp-hop – race music that’s all it was evert meant to be..
Robert, you make no sense. First of all, who thinks that Hip Hop created interracial harmony? If you think that Hip Hop is “black people denigrating themselves”, you’re already lost. Read more articles here. Do your homework. Stop the racist propaganda. You don’t write well enough for it.
M.C. K-Swift, I love when kids tell me to do homework and tell me to read more articles “here”. I guess I am lost, because “Black people” created Rap Music, your Jewish friends created Hip-Hop with Tommy Boy, Wild Style, MTV, Source, ect. I know my history and its always been “racist propaganda” when people like myself and Dr. Van Serima have told America the truth. Hip-hop is an acronym for “helping ignorant people – hurt our people”, go back to the Philadelphia Inquirer or Tribune newspapers and read the articles. This ain’t new, Child, its just “time”. Time for Black people to grow up and learn who’s been controlling their minds for the past 24 years with “their” propaganda. As long as a certain percentage of our people end up in prison and not in college, its all good. No, hip-hop has been “racist propaganda” for 24 years, its time that “our” people wake up.
Just like they tried to destroy and bury the Black people’s history in Kemet and tried to erase Rap Music and everything else Black created, as the lady once said “And Still I Rise”. There’s a time, M.C. K-Swift. The “truth” has always been here, its just a matter of time.
Check out the Blumethal video how your friends really feel about my people. I’m pushing “racist propaganga”? “WHITE POWER!?”
No, you can’t handle the truth, K- not so Swift.
This is just so sad. I grew up in a small town in central New Jersey and went to school with white kids, black kids, Asian kids, Christians, and Jews, and we were all friendly I’m white and my two best friends, one black and one Jewish, and i did everything together. I was shocked when I went away to college and saw the bigotry. You’d think that 20 years later things would be better not worse. We have a good man in the white house, someone who represents the best of what we can do together, and the Right and their minions attack him with thinly veiled racial slurs, block everything he does, and then blames him for everything. Now this. A high school reunion, a prom, bigotry and racial intolerance masquerading as tradition, and affecting another generation. This breaks my heart.
What is wrong with people? Seriously, what makes them like this? Where does all this hate come from and why does it spread? Why can’t people open their eyes and think for themselves? I am afraid that I must seem very naive, but honestly, I just do not understand.