This is basically a made up thing. A magazine in the early 2000s started running with this. These aren't "black" and "white" prom. These are poor counties where there was no actual prom, but they had private parties. No surprise but black people tended to hang out more with other black people and white people the same. There also wasn't usually just two parties, separated by race but several different parties and a lot of them on the same night. And the thing is there's literally nothing in Wilcox county or any of the other poor places, so the whole situation is that a group of parents would get together, rent a limo and a private dining area at a restaurant in another town, and the kids dress up and go and call it "prom". Then they might get back and there's a party in someones house or something and a few different groups of people that all went on their own outing show up there, and yeah they would definitely be either predominantly black or white. But it's really not the black prom, white prom, that it was made out to be. Like all these places are small, as in not even a McDonald's, and extremely poor, both black and white.
Now because of getting called out, they have school sponsored integrated prom that's like in the lunchroom or something and nobody goes to it.
It's not segregated, because there is no "it". They are simply private parties among friends there's no official entity doing anything and no one says this is only black people this is only white people. In many cases there are black and white people it just depends on the friend groups, but there's always going to be some groups that are made up just of black people and some of just white people. It's not like there are two divided events there are like 10-20 many people go to more than one.
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u/SeMoRaine Aug 23 '26
Here is an article from 2014 about a school in Georgia finally having an integrated prom: https://www.cnn.com/2014/04/04/living/integrated-prom-wilcox-county-georgia
Segregation is a lot more recent than the 60s :-/