"We Never Had a Prom": Extracurricular Activities in the Desegregation of Public Schools

• In Event: Desegregation and the Struggle for Equitable Education

Abstract

In the aftermath of the Brown (1954) decision, segregationists warned about the dire consequences of “race mixing” and built their campaign to preserve segregated public schools around predictions that integration of schools would bring about interracial dating, and marriage, thus the end of “racial integrity” and the dominance of the White race (McMillen, 1971). When schools were finally forced to desegregate, they grappled with such questions as: What is acceptable socializing outside the classroom? When was intermingling definitely off limits? These questions were worked out, in part, in the extra-curricular where race, adolescent identity, and youth culture collided and coalesced in ways that both transformed and reproduced race relations in the South.

Authors

• Natalie G. Adams, The University of Alabama

• James H. Adams, Mississippi State University