Change comes slowly to this Old South town of stately mansions and Confederate flags on pickup trucks, where dogwood blossoms and racially segregated high school proms are sure signs of spring.
There are no signs of racial division among the 760 students at modern, red-brick Eufaula High School. Sixty percent are white, but the president of the student body and president of the 180-member senior class are black, as are the basketball and football homecoming queens.But when it comes time to don formal gowns and rented tuxedoes for the annual junior-senior affair, white students go to one dance, blacks to another. Both are sponsored by private groups, not the school itself.
"I think we're the only school in Alabama that does this. We're the only one in America, I hope," said senior class president James Samuel, who is bound for the U.S. Air Force Academy after graduation.
"They seem to think that if we go to dances together, there will be racial flareups, a fight," said Carmen Campbell, 18, a white senior and friend of Samuel.
Community leaders say the southeast Alabama city of about 14,000 still has segregated proms even though the public school system was integrated 20 years ago after years of maintaining separate schools for blacks and whites.
Superintendent Dan Parker said the school district got out of the dance business completely four years earlier, but he denied race was the reason.
"Alcohol usually gets to be a problem," said Parker, who has headed the 2,900-student system since 1978.
The school system also refuses to sponsor homecoming dances and sock-hops. An ROTC banquet planned for late May will be the first school-sanctioned social event in about two decades, officials said.
"If the whites don't want to have a prom with the blacks, you can't make them, and vice versa," said W.D. Moorer, a school board member since the 1950s. "I don't think it's been a big issue, but it might be now."