Charleston High School's first integrated prom gets the Hollywood treatment

The small Delta town of Charleston integrated its schools in 1970. But it took thirty-eight years to integrate the prom. North Mississippi reporter Cari Gervin has the story on the movie about Charleston High’s first interracial prom.

Chasidy Buckley was born in Charleston, but she moved to Grenada at a young age.

“Funny thing is that Grenada’s like 30 minutes from Charleston, and I had lots of white friends. I was like the only little black girl at their parties. I had sleepovers with them and everything, and I never felt like I was different. And then we moved to Charleston at the beginning of my eighth-grade year, and things switched. Thirty minutes away, things were completely different.”

A completely different world of race relations, Buckley says, down to that mythical pinnacle of the modern high school experience – prom.

“My sisters graduated from Grenada High School, and they went to an integrated prom. I mean, it was just prom, regular. It wasn’t called integrated prom. If we can do everything together up until our senior year, and when it comes time for prom, our last dance together, and we split – that’s the big deal.”

This is where Paul Saltzman comes in. The Canadian filmmaker spent time near Greenwood in the 1960s as a civil rights activist. During a return visit to Mississippi in 2007, he heard that Charleston High School held two separate proms each spring – one for the white students, and one for the black students. He had just finished working with Charleston native Morgan Freeman on a project:

“And I picked up the phone and I called him and I said, ‘Is this true?’" Paul Saltzman says. “What we had heard was that he had offered to pay for the whole prom if it would be integrated and that no one had taken him up on the offer. And he said, yes, ten years ago he had made the offer in 1997. And I said to him on the phone, ‘Is the offer still good?’ And there was a pause, and he said, ‘Oh. Okay.’”

Freeman told the school board that if the high school held an integrated prom, he would pay for it. And Paul Saltzman? Well, he filmed it.

Saltzman and his wife moved to Charleston for four and a half months last spring. They followed students, faculty and parents for weeks leading up to the prom, determined to see what would happen. The resulting documentary, “Prom Night in Mississippi,” just premiered at Sundance and has gotten national attention.

But the students in the movie care about more than seeing themselves on the big screen. John Ellis Ray is a student from Charleston now enrolled in college.

“I think it’s maybe changed things. I hope we started something, that you know, will go on forever.”

Ray, along with Chasidy Buckley, is one of several students profiled in the documentary. As the only white player on the basketball team – his nickname was “White Chocolate” – Ray never understood the point of segregated proms, even though he attended them, even last spring. Because that’s the thing – there was still a separate white-only prom last spring.

John Ellis Ray: “That was just, you know, ridiculous. If Morgan Freeman, you know, he offered to pay for it, it seems like the white prom would have just, you know, not happened, because, you know, the real idea of the thing was getting us all together.”

The parents who organized the white prom would not speak on- or off-camera to Saltzman. In the film, he uses cartoons to imagine what the scene might have been like. In fact, the parents went so far as to hire a lawyer to state their side of the story in the movie.

That lawyer, Jeff Padgett, is speaking here on behalf of his clients. He says the idea for the two proms really boils down to the fact that most of the white students listen to country music and most of the black students listen to hip-hop.

“It was really about the music, and the students and their dance preferences. Because a lot of black students don’t two-step, and a lot of country music white students don’t, um, know the electric slide.”

The school is planning another integrated prom this year, for which Morgan Freeman is not paying. There is no word yet as to whether there will again be a separate white-only prom. Paul Saltzman says that he can only hope that his movie, in some small way, creates change in more places than just Charleston.

“There isn’t anybody in our whole world that is totally free of prejudice. Everybody has prejudices. And our hope is that people see our film, and they come out of the theater and reflect on their own attitudes and their own beliefs and their own prejudices. Because until we reflect on our own, nothing’s gonna change.”

“Prom Night in Mississippi” makes its regional premiere tonight at the Oxford Film Festival and screens again on Sunday afternoon.

For MPB News, I’m Cari Gervin in Oxford.