Independent Film Festival Boston 2009

For four years, they attended classes together, ate lunch together, played on and cheered for their sports teams together. But when it came time for senior prom, the Charleston High School class of 2007 had two: one for black students and one for white students. When the school was first integrated in 1970—16 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the end of racial segregation in schools—separate proms were established due to parental pressure. Until 2007, this “tradition” remained intact.

Enter lifelong Charleston resident Morgan Freeman, who approaches the school board with a proposal: if they let the students plan an integrated prom, he will pay for it. In 2008, 54 years after the Supreme Court made school segregation illegal, the senior class of CHS is poised to have the school’s first interracial prom––that is, if they can overcome parental opposition, administrative unease, and their own upbringing.

This intriguing documentary follows several individual students as they prepare for the event, which is at once ordinary and groundbreaking. They go through the familiar rituals: picking a theme, trying on outfits, hiring musicians, voting for a king and queen. But with each of these simple choices, these students challenge centuries of institutionalized racism. PROM NIGHT IN MISSISSIPPI is a moving testament the real possibilities that exist when young people take on the power and responsibility for changing their world.

- Kristina Aikens

Screening supported by The Roxbury Film Festival