Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 14, 1990 TAG: 9005140074
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: FORT VALLEY, GA. LENGTH: Medium
But they couldn't attend the most basic of high school rituals together, the prom.
And so, every spring, the white students at Peach County High School danced to their music and crowned a white king and queen at their prom while the black students held a black prom and chose a black king and queen.
The proms were held in separate halls - even in separate towns - and were among the county's most glaring vestiges of racial separation.
"We knew it was wrong, but it was a tradition and people just went along with it," said Kristi Brewton, a black student at the high school.
All of that changed Saturday night.
A hundred black couples and white couples, girls in sequined sheaths and Scarlett O'Hara gowns, arm in arm with dates in tuxedos, floated into the school gymnasium to dance and compare corsages at the county's first integrated prom.
It has taken years of cajoling and pressure from a small group of parents and students to get to this point in a part of Georgia where 10 other counties still hold segregated proms, and where segregated class reunions are not uncommon.
The impetus was from some students who said they were embarrassed by the tradition.
"It's hard to explain when we go on vacation to California," said Ato Crumbly, a black senior. "I'd tell people about our prom and they would get a funny look on their face and ask, `Do you have to drink from separate fountains, too?' "
And so it was not until 35 years after the Supreme Court ordered school desegregation that Kelly Kennedy, a white senior, and Kristi Brewton, a black senior, would be among the county's first black and white classmates able to go to the same prom.
They have been friends since first grade; they sit cater-corner from each other in a homeroom.
They both spent all day Saturday planning and primping and running errands for the big day.
Kennedy took two baths and sat wearing electric hair curlers, putting on coat after coat of raisin-red nail polish.
Brewton went to the beauty shop for finishing touches on her hair and capped her nails with pink polish. They compared notes on their dresses - Kennedy would wear black sequins, Brewton would wear white sequins - and waited nervously for their dates to arrive.
The previous year, they had both gone to their respective proms and reported back to each other with curiosity about how the other race did things.
This time it would be different. "Instead of saying I did this at my prom," Kennedy said, "we can talk about what we did together at our prom."
Change has come slowly to Fort Valley, a town of 10,000 people in central Georgia divided by the railroad track and by race.
Here, most blacks live south of the track, where the jail is, while most whites live north of the track, where the school and most of the businesses are.
Integration has been resisted here since the start of the civil rights movement.
In the 1960s, several establishments shut down rather than permit blacks to fraternize with whites. The movie theater closed years ago, refusing to let blacks and whites sit together.
A generation later a group of parents, teachers and students, seeking to integrate the prom, encountered similar resistance from the white school superintendent and the predominantly white school board.
The board had not sponsored a prom since the years before the high school was integrated in 1970, saying it would expose the board to excessive liability.
That left the planning and financing of the prom to the parents, who also kept themselves racially segregated.
Advocates of integration saw the prom as a symbol and a chance to bring the races together.
"We have our pride and they have their pride," said Ato Crumbly's mother, Dorothy, who is one of the leaders of the parent group.
"It's not just that we want to be with whites. We wanted to change the punitive, stupid rules. We were responding to what our kids wanted."
The parents' group asked the board in 1986 to allow a single, integrated prom. The board voted against it, 5-2.
The parents went to work on electing a new superintendent and some new board members. Last year the board voted 6-1 for an integrated prom.
"There's been a lot of conflict in this county over this problem and we finally worked it out," said one of the newer members of the board, Jerry Murtagh, a professor of political science at Fort Valley State College.
"It really is a different world down here."
by CNB