Nov
16
Sometimes, when I see things like this, I worry about today’s teenagers. (At least I hope it’s teenagers who are the market for this. If it’s grown-ups, then heaven help us all.) But then I saw the new documentary Prom Night in Mississippi on the weekend and was reassured that modern adolescents, at least a group of them in the town of Charleston, Mississippi, are far wiser than the adults around them.
Up until two years ago, the high school in Charleston, which is about 70 percent African-American and 30 percent Caucasian, held two separate proms in the spring, one for black kids and one for whites. Actor Morgan Freeman, who spent his childhood in Charleston and now lives there, wanted to do something about this “idiocy.” So he made a deal with the senior class of 2007: He would pay for the prom if they integrated it. (He made the same offer a decade earlier and was rejected.)
The documentary, which was directed by Canadian filmmaker Paul Saltzman, follows a group of kids over several months as they plan for the school’s first mixed prom and deal with racial bias and distrust. Many of the kids don’t understand why the segregation continues. They have to look no further than some parents and teachers who uphold the separate proms as “tradition”—a polite term for a kind of antebellum-era anxiety over racial mixing.
The doc—which covers everything from tense planning meetings to dress shopping to a profile of the school’s only mixed race couple, the most adorable and unassuming Romeo and Juliet I’ve ever seen—is so charming that I don’t want to give too much away. But what struck me when I saw it and what’s stayed with me since is the enormous pride these kids had in taking their place in history. In Prom Night in Mississippi, the quintessential American coming-of-age event, with all its goofy trimmings, is transformed into a joyful moment of social change—complete with corsages and a stretch limo. Now that’s a revolution you can dance at.
This post was written by Rachel Giese
