RACHEL MARTIN, host:
So it's not often you get to cover an event after it's already over, but that's exactly what happened in the case of the story we told you in our last hour about the Mississippi high school that held its first ever interracial prom. And in order to drill down a little more on this topic, and we will cue the music...
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MARTIN: And we will welcome the BPP web editor, Laura Conaway, into the studio to tell us how that came out. Hey, Laura.
LAURA CONAWAY: Good morning. How are you?
MARTIN: So tell us, you helped - flew us into this whole story in the first place, right?
CONAWAY: Well, I have a friend who runs an alternative weekly newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. It's called the Jackson Free Press, and I was just looking at it one day, and there's a rapper and columnist named Kamikaze who wrote about having been asked to play at Charleston High School's first integrated prom. And for me, as a Mississippian, it was amazing to learn that this school, which had sort of been kind of a little story trickling along my life, still has segregated prom, segregated prom, had integrated its prom with the help of as big a name as Morgan Freeman, and no one had done a story about it.
MARTIN: Yeah. It's pretty shocking.
CONAWAY: I was pretty amazed, and I wanted to see if there were any pictures, maybe Kamikaze had some pictures. And it turned out this woman, Catherine Farquharson, had pictures, because she'd been working with the documentary team, and they're amazing. I just posted a slideshow of some of her work. She talks about why the colors in there are so rich. She says the girls buy their dresses from the same place because there's nowhere else to shop, and it's just - it's wow.
Ms. CATHERINE FARQUHARSON (Photographer, "Prom Night in Mississippi"): The dresses - it was really fascinating. They were all color coordinated, like, they all matched. They were all the same tone. You could see in the pictures, like, I think that's partly why it looked like it was out of a movie, because they all go together.
CONAWAY: And then the guys...
MARTIN: And that's Catherine speaking?
CONAWAY: That's Catherine, yeah. And then the guys all turn up, they dress along similar lines, too.
Ms. FARQUHARSON: You know, the first guy that I photographed put on his suit, and it was white. And I thought, wow! This guy's got such great fashion sense! He's wearing a white tux, how amazing! And then I go to the prom and see that, you know, almost all of them are white, and they have a white suit with the color-coordinated vest with their date. And they all get the suits from the same place. Yeah, it was like a little prom uniform.
CONAWAY: So check it out. It's a very cool looking slideshow. I mean, if you had to go and have a small town in Mississippi integrate its prom for the first time ever, you'd want it to look like this.
MARTIN: Cool.
MIKE PESCA, host:
Good costuming.
MARTIN: What else have you got going on the site? Real quick.
CONAWAY: You know, I was out yesterday, and while I was out, Alison Stewart did a post about what to do with her leftover rice from all the takeout containers they've been having since they had baby Ike. And OK, this thing is still going strong. People - we're talking about making rice Christmas tree ornaments. Anyway...
MARTIN: Wow!
CONAWAY: It's out there.
MARTIN: Thanks, guys. Thanks, BPP listeners, and thank you, Laura Conaway. Go check out that slideshow we talked about, the first integrated prom in the small town of Mississippi, on our website, npr.org/bryantpark. Thanks, lady.
CONAWAY: Thank you.
PESCA: And up next on the show, the big announcement you've some have been waiting for. It's pretty exciting. It's the BPP's Book Club selection.
MARTIN: Woo hoo!
PESCA: What could it be? We'll let you stew on that for a second as I say, this is the Bryant Park Project from NPR News.
MARTIN: Woo hoo!
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