Friends of Justice is currently working on a troubling case in Montgomery County, Mississippi.  I haven’t said anything about the case in this space because we are still in the investigation phase of our work.  But there is no doubt that the High School in Winona, MS held segregated proms until just a couple of years ago.

As this essay in the New York Times makes clear, segregated proms are still held all across the rural South. 

Vestiges of Jim Crow segregation aren’t hard to find in southern high schools if you take the trouble to look.  Jena provides one striking example.  And then there is the case of Church Point, Louisiana (the home of Friends of Justice board member, Ann Colomb) where separate black and white Mardi Gras parades are held every year. 

The competition for homecoming queen i n Church Point was always friendly until Margot Coleman received the most votes from the school’s football team in the mid-1990s.  This result was hardly surprising.  Margot was the best student in the school, the best athlete and (there being no justice in this world) she also possessed Hollywood good looks.  Nonetheless, when Church Point’s new homecoming queen was announced during halftime, a riot broke out in the stands and spilled out into the streets.  Church Point now selects a homecoming court but no queen.

The segregated prom in Montgomery County, Georgia that is featured in the Times article persists because white parents are unwilling to give it up.   Do these parents regard themselves as racists?  Probably not.  If they were called for jury duty and asked if they could objectively adjudicate a case involving a white victim and a black defendant they would answer in the affirmative; and they would be perfectly sincere.

They would be sincerely wrong.

You can find the entire article here, but this brief excerpt should whet your appetite.

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“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.”