By Denis Campbell

It was a Page 11 story. STILL racially segregated proms  exist in the deep USA South. It barely rated a whisper. Perez Hilton getting punched by the Black Eyed Peas manager and the crisis in Iran led the news. All sides said in Georgia said the prom situation was “normal because their parents did it.” When coupled though with the threat of The Voting Rights Act of 1965 possibly not surviving a future Supreme Court fight, it was a coffee through the nose, spit-take moment.

There are those who now argue the Voting Rights Act is no longer needed. Record numbers of African Americans register and vote and we have a black President so why bother(?) is their rationale.

Last week the Supreme Court upheld the law by ignoring it and ruled very narrowly on specific issues in the case. This kicked the broader constitutional issue of the Act down the road until next time. Some see this as an opportunity to attack it directly in the future and release the eight targeted former im Crow law creating  southern states from the “bureaucratic nightmare” of reporting and getting federal approval for all election rule/law changes. Those states were forced into a law they say was designed as a ‘temporary’ fix in the 1960s.

Yet the just completed 2009 prom season at Montgomery County High School in Georgia saw two separate, racially segregated proms. Black students attended their prom on one night and the whites another. Mixed race couples were left out in the social cold, unable (or unwilling) to go to the other’s crowning high school moment. And many other students were unable to be with their opposite race friends on this most important of nights.

Had President Obama’s parents lived a few hundred miles to the Southeast of Kansas, they would have been denied access to the prom.

So where’s the outrage?

How, in 2009, are separate racially segregated high school proms allowed to exist in the US state of Georgia? Those interviewed by the New York Times and UK’s The Telegraph simply shrugged and said “because it’s always been that way.”

It was a seemingly innocuous story in UK’s The Telegraph and they referenced the original breaking story link from The New York Times magazine.

All parties insisted there was no racism, it’s just always been that way. Some kids even bought into their parent’s line of reasoning: they like different kinds of music, they want to be free to express themselves without feeling awkward, the two groups rarely mix in school so why force it? etc.

Because it’s no different than having Coloured and White only drinking fountains, just dressed up prettier! No one thought about the half dozen couple for which colour does not exist and they date inter-racially or the groups of children who think it is a stupid idea because they cannot be with their friends of another race on a most important night. We’ve always done it that way was the lame justification for Jim Crow election laws and segregation in the first place!

This last bastion of segregation need to end. There is no place for it in 2009. The Deep South may feel a special sense of entitlement to old traditions, but splitting of races is 150 years too old.

I grew up in Boston (Massachusetts not Geogia), the so called ‘enlightened non-racist north’ during the 1970s forced integration of South Boston’s public schools. I remember Louise Day Hicks, a City Councillor, led the race baiting and violent talk against forced integration via bussing. Every night the news led with a convoy of black students in busses led by Massachusetts State Police on motorcycles driving into ‘Southie’ pelted by rocks, bottles and racist epithets.

Segregation by any name is unlawful and painful. Just ask the kids who are now adults how proud they are their own kids do not see colour. Look at the 2008 election and how poll after poll of young people showed them unable to consider colour as an issue. We old farts all worried aloud, could America elect an African American president. They don’t see colour, yet are trapped by decisions made by their grand and great grandparents 60-70 years earlier?

And as for the Voting Rights Act, when the next case comes up and the drumbeat to repeal it starts afresh, reference back to this reminder that the South will rise again, and make sure it is not in the way the racists want it to rise.