“We talk about racial healing — but sometimes you have to break open the wound so the healing can truly happen.” Harriet Hollis co-ordinator of the Southwest Georgia Project for Racial Healing

ROCHELLE, GEORGIA—Here in this woebegone stretch of southern Georgia, there’s at least one thing the two solitudes agree on: to walk in Wilcox County is to walk back in time.

For many of the white folks of Rochelle and the four other hamlets dotting the county, that means mostly good things. An Andy of Mayberry existence straight out of the 1950s, with the kids, the grandparents and the church all just a few steps away. Tradition is a word much revered.

Put that notion to the black folks — overwhelmingly, you will find them on the other side of the railway tracks that bisect Rochelle — you get eye-rolls and strained, sad smiles. Opie’s world never quite made it to this side of town, where sagging rooftops and decrepit mobile homes suggest a community struggling to stay afloat.

Yes, Wilcox County lives behind the times, acknowledges Leroy Dantley, 66, Rochelle’s first black town councillor. And though a few things have changed — like the fact that he, a black man, sits on council — change comes “very, very, very grudgingly.”

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“It’s not perfect. We don’t have a real relationship between the black and white communities. But we don’t have lynchings or cross-burnings either,” says Dantley.

“What we have is complacency, comfort zones and status quo baked in on both sides — and along with it slow, gradual progress. Today, there’s one black home on the other side. Twenty-five years ago that was one too many. That’s been the pace.”

Two weeks ago that pace changed wildly as four girls from Wilcox County High School — two black, two white, all honours students — saw their until-then quiet campaign for an Integrated Prom go viral.

From their Facebook page calling for an end to separate white and non-white proms to the microphones of CNN’s Anderson Cooper in what seemed seconds flat, the story exploded.

The year 2013 did a digital drive-by on Wilcox County, slapping it hard upside the head. And the county’s still reeling.

Nobody stopped to ask whether Wilcox is the most racist place on the planet, the Internet just decided. When a story is black and white, it’s black and white, right?

Well, sort of. But not really. There’s plenty more to tell about Wilcox County, pop. 9,000, a place with somewhat more nuance that you might expect.

The county was still numb from its new-found infamy when I went looking to make sense of it. And a reasonable place to start is history — and whether it holds any clues as to what sets Wilcox apart.

There’s plenty. Unwind a century and a half and Wilcox is where Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, spent his final days before he was captured, the night the Union drove old Dixie down.

Long memories endure today of what the Yankee papers made of that rebellion-ending moment. Davis, Union propaganda said, was arrested in a final humiliation, wearing one of his wife’s dresses in a bid to make good his escape. It’s a claim historians now universally reject. But it stuck.

And freshly burned by global infamy, a bitter aftertaste is evident still among much of the county’s white population. During three days of interviews, I was invited to go fishing, invited to take tea and gaze at an elderly resident’s private art collection, invited to pray, even. But the requisite southern hospitality did not extend to taking names for the record. Written off as racist spawn, the whites of Rochelle will give you an earful — but they are not willing to stick their necks out to reporters by name.

All except for Wayne McGuinty, owner of RW Furnishings and wearer of many more hats besides, from volunteer fire chief to deacon at 1st Avenue Baptist to head of the local Republican committee.

“This is not a place filled with hatred. But the comments on these prom stories, people are saying, ‘The South always was and always will be the a--hole of America,’ ” said McGuinty, 51.

“We’re trying to do the best we can with the hand we’ve been dealt. What people don’t realize is that they’re kicking a county that is already down on its luck. Really down.”

Down, some might say, for the count. From the threadbare main street, where a hardware store, a dress shop and a pool hall are among the holdouts against the creep of boarded-up storefronts, Rochelle and the rest of Wilcox look to be dying out

Farming has always been number one in Wilcox — peanuts, pecans, cotton, watermelon, plus a bit of timber.

But rapid advances in mechanized farming stripped the fields of most work, hitting the black community especially hard. Then, 15 years ago, the county’s single largest employer, Ithica Industries, packed up its textiles plant and moved to Honduras, throwing a biracial workforce of 450 women onto the street.

“That was devastating. All we have left is a peanut-processing plant, which has about 40 good jobs, and thank God for that at least,” said Vickie Kemp, another of Rochelle’s black town councillors.

“You can’t understand Wilcox County unless you understand the hits we’ve taken, economically. There’s no question race is an issue. It is. But the challenge of finding work is a huge part of it.”

God is never far from the equation in Wilcox County. Each Sunday, the area self-segregates into more than two dozen churches, with the divisions cutting along both racial and class lines. Overwhelmingly, they are Baptist, from Rochelle’s version of high society comprising the most exclusive congregation all the way to old-school Primitive Baptist services, replete with foot-washing and a ban on musical instruments.

Kemp and other prominent black figures in the county attribute the prom furor to “divine intervention.”

“Never in a million years did these girls envision it would explode around the world. It has to be the hand of God,” says Kemp.

Dantley sees it too. “I love my county. But this is something bigger. The Lord works in mysterious ways, and even if we’re talking something as superficial as a prom, I have to believe He has put us on the map now to make something better of ourselves. All of us.”

But there are other hands behind the Wilcox prom story.

One belongs to Harriet Hollis, co-ordinator of the Southwest Georgia Project for Racial Healing, a Kellogg Foundation-backed initiative based in nearby Albany.

It was Hollis who led a pair of meetings last September in Rochelle that planted the first seeds for the Integrated Prom. The first meeting, a free-ranging encounter, inspired Toni Rucker, mother of the one of the four teens behind the project. That afternoon, Rucker summoned her daughter Mareshia and friends for a follow-up session to blue-sky what they would like to see change in Wilcox.

“We had a very candid dialogue, and that’s when I learned there were segregated proms. I was floored,” Hollis says.

“We talked about Martin Luther King, we talked about sacrifices and how hard things can be when you challenge the status quo. I could see these kids wanted to take it on, I just did my best to guide it along.

“The prom is the symbol, but the absence of black teachers in the Wilcox school system is the material issue. Some of these kids have gone through their entire school years not seeing a single black professional. We talk about racial healing — but sometimes you have to break open the wound so the healing can truly happen.”

The wounds, most certainly, are now open. In an extensive interview at the Rucker home, I spoke at length with Mareshia and her best friend and fellow prom activist, Stephanie Sinnot, about their efforts to control the lightning their viral story unleashed.

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In a county where those with get up and go tend to get up and leave, the Ruckers are rare — a black family that migrated from suburban Atlanta in the late ’90s. Still newcomers, by the standards of insular Wilcox.

Within minutes of entering the home, you realize you are in the rare company of three generations of extremely strong women — beginning with grandmother Brenda Madison.

“When we bought this place, the local bank took me aside and said, ‘Black people around here don’t get loans to buy property, they get loans to buy cars.’ And I said to him, ‘Well I guess I’m a different kind of black person than the ones you’re used to.’”

Madison ran for school board that year — and won. And began to absorb what she saw as an entrenched old guard, wherein teachers — white teachers — would pass their jobs to their children and grandchildren as they retired. A closed shop, with precious good-paying jobs handed down like family heirlooms, regardless of teaching ability.

“There’s no question the scarcity of jobs is a factor. People keeping it inside the family,” says Madison. “But some of the old attitudes come down with it.”

Earlier, I had by far the ugliest encounter of this journey inside the Rochelle pool hall. A gaggle of white men drinking Bud Lite pounced when they learned a Canadian journalist was in their midst.

The air suddenly became blue with that word that starts with n and rhymes with bigger. “Y’all got n-----s up there? Cos you’re welcome to ours, every last one of them,” said one.

Then, one swig later, “This is a nonstory. Y’all wasted time and money coming down here.”

Meeting Mareshia and Stephanie in the protected confines of the Rucker home came as a breath of fresh air. Neither they nor their co-activists at Wilcox High imagined their effort would lift beyond the pages of the local news.

“We’re best friends. All we wanted was to be able to celebrate prom together,” says Mareshia, with an arm wrapped over Stephanie’s shoulders.

“We went to the school first and asked for their help. Not money, just a letter of support. All we wanted was five words — ‘We support the Integrated Prom.’ But they gave us a vague statement instead, and it wasn’t enough.”

The girls are overwhelmed — and clearly somewhat nervous — about where it goes now. Next Saturday, they will have their prom, with at least 50 of their fellow students — half the senior class — attending.

But with tensions high, they don’t intend to announce how much money their Facebook page has generated until after the celebration, amid concerns the event will be a magnet for trouble.

Says Mareshia’s mom Toni: “They’re consulting a lawyer to make sure every penny is accounted for. There’s more than enough to pay for the prom. Enough to get started on a legacy fund to enable future Integrated Proms.”

It was spring break when the story went viral. When the girls returned to school last week, the halls were abuzz with the fallout. And harsh feelings from some of their fellow students.

“Most of my (white) friends aren’t speaking to me right now,” Stephanie allows in a hushed whisper. “I walk down the hall and they look away, don’t make eye contact.”

It is also clear that the stand she is taking is not finding much support on the home front. I am reminded of something that Kemp, the Rochelle councillor, told me earlier: “The friendships amongst our kids are genuine. I think it must be harder on the white kids since they took this stand — I can only imagine what they’re going through.”

The backlash extends to the local black community, where Toni Rucker and Madison say there is a “fear of causing upset.”

Last weekend, the Integrated Prom organizers went ahead with a fundraising luncheon, even through the party was already paid for through Facebook donations. They redirected the proceeds to two families — one white, one black — who had lost their homes in recent fires.

Says Mareshia: “Feelings are raw right now. But we know in our hearts we’re doing the right thing. Things are different for people our age. There are some racist attitudes in the school, but for the most part you have real friendships between black and white. For us, the times are changing.

“The real hope is that this has an afterlife. That what we started can carry on with just one prom in the years ahead.”

Dantley, the Rochelle councillor, takes the long view on the uproar in Wilcox County. He graduated in 1963 from the now-razed Excelsior High School at a time when “we tried so hard to achieve because we had no clue what was happening inside the white high school. We just assumed they were turning out geniuses.

“It wasn’t until after integration that we realized the white kids were just as dumb as the blacks,” he laughs.

Later, during a tour of army duty in Vietnam, Dantley experienced his closest shave with civil-rights era unrest. His multiracial platoon began arguing over rioting in Detroit, “the n-word got thrown out and the next thing we knew the M-16s came out, white and black pointing guns at each other.”

That, said Dantley, was tense. The current tensions in Wilcox, he says, pale in comparison.

“For me, the best change we could hope for is economic revival. You don’t think about black and white so much when you’re looking at green,” he says. “We have our issues. But show me a place in America, from New York to California, where race isn’t an issue? There isn’t one.”

Not everyone is willing to let Wilcox off the hook so easily. Brian Long, executive director of Atlanta-based political progressives Better Georgia, said the prom controversy now stands as the most visible vestige of segregation-era South.

“The students who want to uphold and defend white proms as ‘separate-but-equal’ tradition weren’t alive in the 1970s,” said Long.

“I don’t think they fully grasp why separate proms exist. They were a hate-filled and spiteful way for white parents to rebel against desegregated classrooms. The attitude was, ‘You can make us go to school together but you can’t make us dance together.’

“We don’t want to apologize for Georgia. But as important as tradition is in the South, we need to stand up and not let a very small minority of people with racial hatred speak for us. It’s incredibly brave, what these girls are doing. And a great opportunity for us to tell the rest of the world we’re leaving that legacy behind.”

But with the spotlight shining so intensely on this one county, Rochelle councillor Vickie Kemp worries for the aftermath.

“The real question is, what’s gonna happen when the TV cameras leave? If we don’t take advantage and come together collectively, black and white together, it will be for naught.”

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