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16 2 Segregated Proms in 2003 Alfred Dennis Mathewson Racially segregated high school proms are in the news. The coverage superficially depicts these incidents as vestiges of racism in rural Southern school districts . I moved away from the South over thirty years ago and I know there is far more to the story. There was no media scrutiny of the proms in 1971 when I graduated from Bertie Senior High School in Windsor, North Carolina. No one cared about them except the students who had gone to school for nearly twelve years and were looking forward to this rite of passage. you cannot appreciate what the proms meant in the South then without some idea of that nearly twelve-year journey. My own journey occurred in at least three schools, beginning at W. A. Patillo High School, a K–12 school in Tarboro, North Carolina. When I entered first grade in 1959 five years after Brown v. Board of Education was decided, the schools were segregated, and they stayed that way until strange things started happening during my junior high school years. Then we heard of something called freedom-of-choice plans, under which children could attend any public school of their parents’ choice. Of course, this meant that black children could choose to attend the much better financed white schools. I believe we were the third black family to go to the white schools in Tarboro when my mother chose to send my younger brothers to Bridgers Elementary in the spring of 1967. They have stories to tell. It was my turn to go when I entered ninth grade, but we moved to Ahoskie and I attended the white school there, where integration had advanced beyond that in Tarboro. There, many black students opted for Ahoskie High School over the all-black R. L. Vann High School. My family moved twice more so that I wound up finishing at Bertie, where freedom-of-choice plans had progressed to consolidation. In 1963, Bertie County built two identical high schools—one white and one black. By the time we moved there in 1969, the white high school had become the county high school for all students and the black high school had been designated the junior high school for all students. It was majority black. Back then there was no prom, black or white, in Bertie County. The school board had eliminated the homecoming dance and the prom upon consolida- Alfred Dennis Mathewson 17 tion, along with virtually every other social event at which white girls might socialize with black boys. Integration created problems even with the cheerleading squads. When no black girl made the squad during my freshman year at Ahoskie High, black football players organized a boycott of classes by black students. There had been a competition, but none of the black cheerleaders who had left R. L. Vann had been deemed good enough to make the squad. Faced with the decimation of a state championship contender, the school reconsidered and a black cheerleader was added. The wave of separate proms today has been defended on the grounds that this is the way things have always been. Lost in these apologias are the stories of the black and white students who tried to make integration work, students who tried to do things a different way. The prom, or rather the absence of the prom, was a unifying event for my senior class. My classmates in the class of 1971 believed that a prom was a fundamental right. Several of us, black and white, girls and boys, got together and decided we did not need the permission of the school board, superintendent, or principal to have a prom. If they would not give us one, we would give ourselves a prom. We arranged to have it at the National Guard Armory. When the authorities learned of our plans, they capitulated. If there was going to be a prom, it was going to be held somewhere they could monitor the situation. It was held in the gymnasium instead. We had a wonderful time. The last thing on our minds as we danced the penguin was that the prom was integrated. We were teenagers—juniors and seniors having a dance. I did not take my girlfriend home until 3:00 am, ruining my reputation with her parents as a nice young man. After the prom, we went to a segregated club, not because it was segregated but because it was where we...

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