The "Integration Under the Sea" dance -- only in Mississippi

In 1997, actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for the senior prom at Charleston High School in his hometown of Charleston, Mississippi, where he still resides today. The school declined. Why? Because Freeman was only willing to foot the bill on one condition: The prom had to be integrated. Even though the school had been desegregated since 1970, every spring the seniors had two separate privately-hosted proms -- one for white students and one for black students. Ten years later, filmmaker Paul Saltzman approached Freeman and asked if the offer was still on the table. This time, the school agreed, and thus the HBO documentary "Prom Night in Mississippi" begins. When I first heard about this film about a year ago, I was still living in Greenwood, about an hour south of Charleston. If you're living in (insert name of any non-southern white-bread American suburb here) and you hear about a high school that doesn't allow white and black students to mix at the prom and it's the 21st century, you might be shocked. But if you live in the Mississippi Delta or in many other places around the South, this story is so familiar you feel like you could have written it yourself. In Greenwood, for example, having separate proms isn't an issue -- because black and white students don't even attend the same school (yes, this is still happening, in the United States, in 2010.) "Prom Night in Mississippi" focuses mainly on the students of Charleston High School, many of whom don't agree with the segregated proms and are excited about changing the tradition and making history at their school. As Saltzman learns through the school administrators and the students themselves, it's mostly the parents and the school board members who have forced this out-of-date custom. And as plans for the integrated prom are underway, the film crew learns that some parents, who refused to be interviewed, are still planning on hosting a "private" prom for the white students. This theme of passing the blame onto the older generations is replayed throughout, but the film's weakness is that it's missing the voices of these parents and school board members. We hear the students, staying true to their young ideals, calling the separate proms "stupid" and saying they "don't care about race and just accept people for who they are," but it doesn't dig much deeper than that. In fact, though the racism of the people of Charleston was discussed throughout the film, no one who actually represented these views agreed to an interview. So we never really get a taste of the bitterness at the heart of the story. So, in the end, even though the school's first integrated prom went off without a hitch, there was still a white prom, and we don't quite understand why. Perhaps for many people, just the idea of modern high school students being subjected to Jim Crow-esque segregation is a novel concept, but I was hoping for more out of "Prom Night in Mississippi." More information, more insight, and especially more honesty. I was left wondering how the students of Charleston High School and residents of the town REALLY felt about each other and about this historical event.