This isn't breaking news, and it doesn't even give any particularly new insights into race relations in the South, but I just found out about it, and I thought it was very sobering.
In April of 2004, Eunice High School sponsored its very first integrated prom.
That's right - for the first time in Eunice, blacks and whites had their prom (gasp!) at the same time and in the same place. After hearing about this, I then found out that a high school in Georgia had just integrated their prom for the first time in 2003. Apparently it didn't go so well, because in 2004, some of the white students held their own, separate, prom again.
More on Eunice below the fold.
The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that the separate proms were
not sponsored by the school. They were privately organized events, which I
assume means they were not officially endorsed or supported by the school, but that's only an assumption. Still, the lack of a school-sponsored mixed prom certainly couldn't have helped the situation. From the first article (emphasis is mine):
The separate proms were not about race. They say it had just been going on for so long, that it was just steeped in tradition; but when asked about this new prom, the majority of residents said "It's about time."
I don't understand how anyone could possibly make this statement and believe it. They may not have
cared that it was about race, but what else could it be about?
A friend of mine who works at KPLC told me that Graham Winch, the reporter who covered this story, received written threats in the days after it aired, so apparently not all the residents were so happy to see the change.
I posted this story on The Regular, and a user there who used to live in Eunice offered these thoughts:
To understand this story, you really have to understand the Louisiana school system. Louisiana has an enormously high proportion of private schools, more so than any other state. Towns where there are private schools are not integrated at all because of this. When integration was first mandated, all of the whites who could fled into public schools. This made the public school system predominantly black and the state has always given public schools extremely shoddy funding. Without funding, the public school system deteriorated, so even when fear of integration faded, the public schools were in such a sorry state that no one wanted their children there. My family lived in Eunice, but when I turned five they moved ten miles over to a town with no private schools so I could attend the integrated public school there. I received a great education with most of the people in my class who could afford to going to good universities and excelling there. I find the death threats doutable. If these parents were truly that opposed to their children integrating, they wouldn't send them to Eunice High in the first place which is over half African American. Probably the threats are coming from older community members who do not even have school-aged children. That community is to a good degree integrated; interracial friendships and relationships are normal if less common. The south receives a bad rap on race relations because of the past, but today the races are in reality much more integrated than in the north because there are no suburbs in which to hide in, except around the major cities. It's hard to maintain strongly racist feelings when you're working with other races as equals on a day to day basis and you're race is not in the majority.
I feel compelled to point out that I don't know if they were
death threats, although likely some of them were. I hope she's right about the threats coming from older residents who are still stuck in the pre-civil rights days. And I agree that the North can, in some areas, be less integrated than the South. (On the whole, I'd say it's the Midwest that's the worst in this aspect.)
At any rate, I don't know what to make of all this, and I don't have any over-arching philosophy or agenda to advance here. I just thought there were probably others out there like me, who thought we had gotten past this point a long, long time ago, and I figured those others ought to be informed.
Plus, I'd never written a diary before, and I thought it'd be fun :)