Two nearby school districts have already gone through what Wilcox County is facing: ending the practice of private segregated proms. (AP Images.)
Veteran educator Henry Walding used to joke that if he ever became a high school principal, he would do away with prom.
Now principal of Montgomery County High School in Mount Vernon, Walding will spend Saturday night chaperoning his school’s first official prom in nearly a half century.
And the prom is integrated, which wasn’t always the case in this small southeast Georgia district where white and black students once attended separate proms.
In the aftermath of 1970s-era integration, many small-town Southern white parents didn’t want race mixing at social events, while administrators feared proms would exacerbate tensions around the closing and merging of schools.
Montgomery is among the school districts in the South where proms went from school-based functions to segregated private affairs, held off campus without any school