ARTelevision

ALBANY, GA (Talon News) -- Students in the rural town of Albany, Georgia are planning to hold a private, whites-only prom this year, the Associated Press reported Thursday. The decision comes one year after the school held its first racially integrated prom.

The school's junior class is in charge of planning each year's prom. Last year, juniors broke with tradition and held their first integrated dance. That class, now the school's senior class, is mostly expected to attend this year's integrated prom.

Until last year, Taylor County High School had private, separate proms for blacks and whites for 31 years, as school officials attempted to avoid problems arising from interracial dating.

This year, the school's black junior class president is planning an integrated prom, which a number of white students have said they will attend. Some students plan to attend both proms in order to be with friends.

"I think a lot of seniors were disappointed," senior Erin Posey told the AP. "Now we have to choose between two groups of friends."

Taylor County High school, which has 439 students, is about one half black.

The integrated prom is being held nearby at Fort Valley State University, whereas the whites-only prom is being held 50 miles away, which may provide an incentive to the students to attend the integrated prom.

After the forced integration of schools in the rural South, separate proms were common. Taylor County High School was among the last to end the practice, and now most Southern high schools hold integrated proms.

Yet de facto segregation due to residential differences appears to be rising again in the South, as courts end the busing orders that were put in place in the 1970s to create diversified student bodies, according to the Harvard Civil Rights Project.

The North is typically more segregated by race, as many Northerners go to school in largely-white suburbs, while minorities do so in the cities. Yet the South and West are "resegregating" quickly, according to the study.

Whites, on average, go to schools that are at least 80 percent white, while blacks and Hispanics go to schools that are about 30 percent white. By contrast, in the mid-1980s, blacks and Hispanics went to schools that were more than 35 percent white. Asians usually attend integrated high schools.
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This is sad, man.
I can't imagine why this sort of thing could possibly occur.
Evidently it is a result of a hands-off policy by the school -
allowing students to plan their own proms.

I don't know what to say.
It just bugs me no end.
This story bothers me more than any I read today.
I hope it concerns you too.
How could anyone at all want this?

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