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Mareshia Rucker, center, and Stephanie Sinnott, right, are two of the four students who came up with the idea of an integrated prom in Wilcox County, Ga.

Wilcox County high schoolers are having their first integrated prom tonight. Let’s wish them good luck! Have a fun night of dancing and be safe! You are great role models for young and old alike. The world is proud of you!

From NYT:

Mareshia Rucker watched in frustration last weekend as several dozen classmates in tuxedos and gowns walked into an Art Deco theater for her high school’s “white prom.”

Like all black students at Wilcox County High School, she was not invited. The rural county in central Georgia is one of the last pockets in the country with racially segregated proms.

“These are people I see in class every day,” said Ms. Rucker, a senior, who hid in a parked car outside the prom. “What’s wrong with dancing with me, just because I have more pigment?”

But this weekend, after decades of separate proms for white students and black students, Wilcox County will have its first integrated prom.

Organized by students, it is open to all, at a ballroom in nearby Cordele. Nearly half of the school’s 380 students have registered, with roughly equal numbers of black students and white students.

A group of four female students — two black and two white — came up with the idea, and they have received an outpouring of support from across the country. Their Facebook group has 24,000 fans, and it has raised enough in donations to rent a ballroom and buy food and gift bags for every couple.

Disc jockeys from Texas and Atlanta volunteered to play music, a motivational speaker from Florida is delivering a speech, and photographers from New York and Savannah are taking pictures, all without cost. In response, the Wilcox County school board plans to vote this spring on making future proms official school events, which would prohibit racial segregation.

…

Wayne McGuinty, a furniture store owner and City Council member, who is white, said he had donated to fund-raising events for both proms in past years and saw no problem with separate proms. They do not reflect racism, he said, but simply different traditions and tastes. When he was a senior in high school, in the 1970s, he said, there were separate proms for those who liked rock music and country music.

“This whole issue has been blown out of proportion,” he said. “Nobody had a problem with having two proms until it got all this publicity.”

Parents who organized the white prom declined to comment, as did students who attended.

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