Students at Taylor County High in Butler, GA, hold first integrated prom

Jet, May 27, 2002

After 31 years a rural Georgia county high school put an end to an old tradition by celebrating its first integrated prom at the Four Points Sheraton in Columbus, GA.

Taylor County High, located in Butler, a town in central Georgia with a population of 8,800 people, has 420 students, 226 of them Black. Nearly 75 percent of the juniors and seniors supported the proposal of an integrated prom suggested by 17-year-old junior Gerica McCrary, who is Black.

"In the beginning the students were afraid of change," said McCrary. "But the kids got together. The students tore down the Berlin Wall. Both sides were tired of it. Now, I walk through the halls of the school and people are smiling," she explained. "It brings tears to my eyes. We are in unity."

McCrary hopes that the prom, which is not considered a school event but a private party, will end the school's long history of segregation.

Many public schools in the rural South ignored federal orders to desegregate for decades. Taylor County did not allow Blacks and Whites to sit in the same classroom until 16 years after the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. the Board of Education that declared segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954.

It wasn't until the 1970s that many of the Georgia high schools decided to integrate. After that many school officials stopped sponsoring proms, in part because of the fear of interracial dating. Taylor County High has been one of the last schools to cling to the practice.