RACHEL MARTIN, host:
Charleston, Mississippi, 1965, a delta town deep in the epicenter of racism in America, a hot bed of Klan activity, and strongly opposed to integration. Charleston was a town fighting to shield itself from the civil rights movement that was erupting all around it. When integration came calling, Charleston fought hard against what many white residents saw as an outrage, black students and white students side by side in the classroom.
Fast forward some 40 years. Charleston, Mississippi, today is a town with just over 2,000 people. The majority of them are African-American, and since 1970, the halls of the town's one public high school, Charleston High, are filled with both black and white students. But look a little closer and the ghost of Charleston's past still haunt this town.
The school dances, including the prom, have been segregated since anyone can remember. White students plan the white prom, and black students plan their own. Chasidy Buckley is an African-American student who just graduated from Charleston High. I spoke with her recently about race relations in her town, in her school and at her prom.
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MARTIN: If you were to come visit Charleston from somewhere outside of the state, how would you perceive the relationship between the black community and the white community? Is there any tension? Or does everyone get along pretty well?
Ms. CHASIDY BUCKLEY (2008 Graduate, Charleston High School, Mississippi): Well, there isn't much tension. It depends on where you go. Like, some people are OK, some of the stores are owned by blacks, and some are owned by whites. Some of the stores that are owned by whites aren't - you know, you don't feel very comfortable in them sometimes, but sometimes you do. It just depends on where you go, but, like, there is a black restaurant owned by black people, you know, and a lot of whites eat there.
MARTIN: What's the vibe like at school? Does everybody hang out together? Is it pretty integrated, like at lunch time, everyone's sitting together, or people really stay separated into their own racial groups?
Ms. BUCKLEY: There's a lot of separation. Like, we have a 15 minute break that we can hang out in the hallways and eat a snack, whatever, and a lot of whites hang out in one area, and then blacks are wherever they want to be, but all the whites are like in one area, except for there are a few blacks and whites that hang together. We have an interracial couple.
MARTIN: There's one couple that's dating that's interracial?
Ms. BUCKLEY: Yes, ma'am, that I know of.
MARTIN: And how are they - is everyone cool with that? Or are they treated - have they had a hard time?
Ms. BUCKLEY: Everybody's fine with it.
MARTIN: It sounds kind of like things are, you know, all right.
Ms. BUCKLEY: Yeah.
MARTIN: It's not like there are big, big fights or anything, big huge outbreaks of, really, any violence, or anything related to racial separation.
Ms. BUCKLEY: Everything is pretty much OK. Sometimes people make a big deal out of it, but we get along pretty good. We play sports together and stuff, so it's OK. It's not a big deal. It's not what people think. From the outside looking in, it might look really bad, because of, you know, the separate proms and stuff, but it's not that bad.
MARTIN: Well then, you know, it is kind of hard for outsiders. You look at this town and your school and you think well, if everyone's getting along so well, why do you have to have two separate proms?
Ms. BUCKLEY: Well, what we learned is that it's the - their parents. That's the way that it's always been for them. That's what they say. That's the way it's always been for us, so we just passed it into our kids, and let them do it this way, but I mean, things have changed, so I didn't get why they kept on doing it. But they said that that's just the way it's always been, so why, you know, why change now? Let's just keep going. That's the whole thing with our town. Everybody's afraid of change. It's just horrible.
MARTIN: Did it ever upset you, Chasidy? Did you ever sit back and think about it? Wait a second, we can't go to each other's proms? We have a black prom and a white prom?
Ms. BUCKLEY: Yes. I sat back and thought about it a lot, especially when, about two years ago, a black boy tried to get into the white prom to see his friend, and they told him he had to leave, and they had him escorted out.
MARTIN: Wow. So it's not the kids' issue. Like you said, this young man, the black guy, had friends who were at the white prom...
Ms. BUCKLEY: That's right.
MARTIN: So they clearly have relationships. It's just the parents have decided that this has to go down separately.
Ms. BUCKLEY: Uh-huh.
MARTIN: If you had to explain what the difference is between the black and white proms, what is it? Besides the fact that it's black people and it's white people, is it different music? Is it different styles of dress? Like, are there any real differences?
Ms. BUCKLEY: There are not any differences at all between the separate proms, except for the fact that the white parents are at their prom. That's the only difference. They have a dance with their - that the guys dance with their moms, and the girls dance with their dads for the last time, our bitter-senior walk. And that's pretty much it. That's the only difference between the black and white proms, because we didn't do that. We had the same dress - style of dress, same music, and everything.
MARTIN: You talk a lot about the fact that this is a lot of the tradition of Charleston and of your school. This is the way it's always been. Your mom went to the same school, right?
Ms. BUCKLEY: Yes, ma'am.
MARTIN: And she went to segregated dances?
Ms. BUCKLEY: Yes, ma'am. She did.
MARTIN: Did your mom ever say, oh, I wish this were different?
Ms. BUCKLEY: She actually had been wanting this since I've been in Charleston. See, my sisters went to Grenada High School, and they went to an integrated prom, and that's just the way it is over there, but I came here in eighth grade, and I was telling her about those separate proms, and she was like, that's the way it's always been. She know - she told me about it, but she was like, I wish it could change.
MARTIN: You have an interest in history, you've definitely read about the civil-rights area, Martin Luther King Jr., other activists, black and white, who really made it their life's work to fight for integration. Now, almost 50 years later, here's your school, almost, like, in this crazy time warp. Did you ever think about that, that your - that you are such an exception to what's going on in the rest of the country?
Ms. BUCKLEY: I've always known that we were different, and it kind of hurt my feelings, you know, that everybody's looking down on us, because we're still having separate proms.
MARTIN: One famous resident of Charleston decided it was time to change all that. In 1997, actor Morgan Freeman made an offer to the Charleston School Board. Hold an integrated prom, and I'll pick up the tab. It was an offer they refused time and time again, until this year. In April, Charleston High held its first integrated prom, courtesy of Morgan Freeman.
Documenting the historic night was Canadian filmmaker, Paul Saltzman. He's the director of the forthcoming documentary, "Prom Night in Mississippi." I spoke with him about the evolution of Charleston's first mixed prom. We want to note that this interview contains a racial slur. We consider it germane to the piece, so we won't beep it out.
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MARTIN: So, Paul, my big question is, how in the world is this happening? I mean, I have to tell you, when I first heard that this school was going to be having their first integrated prom, that there had been a separate black prom and a separate white prom, I thought, how is this even happening? I don't know the minutia of civil rights law in America, but I'm pretty sure Brown versus Board of Education said "separate but equal" isn't legal in schools. Can you help me understand how this was even happening?
Mr. PAUL SALTZMAN (Director, "Prom Night in Mississippi"): When the schools were legally integrated in 1954, the South went back to the Supreme Court, and pleading duress, economic duress, they got an extension for the integrating of schools, for - get this - 16 more years. So, in fact, schools in Mississippi didn't have to be integrated until 1970. Now that's a mindblower.
MARTIN: Hm.
Mr. SALTZMAN: In terms of how the high school could have separate proms under the law, that was easy. They didn't have separate proms. They weren't sanctioned by the high school. What happened was the system simply shifted. When the high school integrated in 1970, the high-school prom became two proms, not connected to the school. The black parents put on their own prom. The white parents put on their own prom.
The role of the school, according to Morgan Freeman, was - they kind of excused this by saying, well, it's not our prom. We have nothing to do with it. And it wasn't held in the school, and it wasn't organized by the school. So that's how the tradition kind of continued as separate. Morgan kind of chuckled at that, in meaning the school could have played a proactive role in bringing it together, but custom was custom, and the communities were, and still are, quite separate.
MARTIN: I want to talk a little bit about Morgan Freeman's role in all of this. He kind of took this issue on as his own personal mission to fund an integrated prom. I mean, he was rejected though for years, right?
Mr. SALTZMAN: About 10 years before I met Morgan, he made an offer to the school - to the senior class in the school, to pay for the whole prom if they would integrate it, and no one took him up on the offer, and the offer basically went cold and dead. I called up Morgan and I said, is this true? And he said, yes, I made the offer ten years ago, and I said, is the offer still good? And he said, yes.
And so I said to him that I thought following the story of that offer would be of great interest to young people as a film, and therefore would touch young people in terms of looking at their own attitudes and beliefs around race and around relationships, and he agreed. And so we went to the school board and presented the idea of an integrated prom that Morgan would pay for, and this time the school board accepted, and then Morgan presented the idea to the senior class, and we filmed him making that offer, and tracked the process for the next four months.
MARTIN: Why now? This offer had been on the table for ten years. Was it just the idea that there was a documentarian around who wanted to chronicle this story? I mean, why the change of heart after all this time?
Mr. SALTZMAN: I have a couple of thoughts on it. One was that the offer had been made, and no one took him up on it, and it sort of just became a matter of out of sight, out of mind. When we came along and re-tabled the offer after I spoke to Morgan, I think everything was different. The school board was different. the superintendent was different. The principle was different. And I think that's probably the biggest reason, that it fell on new ears, the offer.
MARTIN: I want to talk about prom night.
Mr. SALTZMAN: Uh-huh.
MARTIN: Can you tell us one vignette or one image that sticks in your mind that really captures the feeling of that night?
Mr. SALTZMAN: Well, the very first thing about prom night that was great was white kids dancing with black kids. White kids and black kids dancing with their same color, but intermingling and having a ball. White kids dancing with the black kids, and singing every word of the hip-hop songs that they knew, and all the motions the same, so that, in a sense, the difference culturally dropped away in many ways.
There was still a white prom held. It was much smaller, because of the integrated prom, but some of the white parents still insisted that there would be a white prom. Some people said it was because of tradition, and fair enough, and other people said, and we were told this on camera by one of the young women who is a senior in the high school, and she was present at a meeting of the committee for the white prom, and she quoted somebody in that meeting saying, I'm not going to have any of those niggers rubbing up against my daughter...
MARTIN: Hm.
Mr. SALTZMAN: As an expression of why there would be a white prom, and why that person's daughter would not be going to the integrated prom.
MARTIN: Nothing has fundamentally changed, then, other than the number of white kids who showed up at the other prom, because there was still an alternate prom happening. There was still a white prom happening, where, I assume, black students still couldn't go to that prom.
Mr. SALTZMAN: That's correct. Black students still couldn't go to the white prom, although none tried, and it would have been interesting to have seen what would have happened, if they had tried with the new open discussions going on.
MARTIN: Uh-huh. The only difference is that the school sanctioned an integrated prom for the first time.
Mr. SALTZMAN: Yes. And that's big. And in fact, in a way, it's huge. The fact that the school sanctioned the prom, the fact that Morgan paid for it, and brought it out on the table again, and that the school and the school board accepted it, is huge. Because now the, sort of, separate corner. We'll have our black prom, you have your white prom, but let's not talk about race. Let's not really air this out.
And now it's on the table, and now the discussions are happening, and there's several opinions about whether the white prom will continue, and of course who knows, that's the future. But the opinions are, even from some of the white kids, no, you know, the white prom will go another year, maybe another two years, butt will be over. I think that things have changed because of this, and I think the ripples go out and they go out in an infinite sense, and not only in the community, but in communities around as well, that people talk. And the integrated prom was a huge success.
MARTIN: Paul Saltzman plans to release his film, "Prom Night in Mississippi," at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and in theaters later next year. Chasidy Buckley went to Charleston's integrated prom in April. We put together a slideshow of some of the photos from that night on our blog, along with more of our interview with Chasidy. Check it out. Lots of good stuff there. Really, some really compelling photos of prom night at npr.org/bryantpark.
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MIKE PESCA, host:
That's all she wrote for this hour of the BPP. We are always online at npr.org/bryantpark, because of this new policy of not shutting off the Internet. We're just going to keep it going. We should call it the always-net. Anyways, just my suggestion. I give it to you free of charge.
MARTIN: Thanks.
PESCA: I'm Mike Pesca.
MARTIN: And I'm Rachel Martin and this is the Bryant Park Project from NPR News.
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