What Year is This?

I thought it was 2007, but I read a story this week that made me think perhaps it was 1950. Turner County High School in Ashburn, Georgia is changing. The senior class has taken it upon itself to overturn a shameful legacy. Earlier this year, they abandoned the school's practice of naming a black and a white homecoming queen.

Now they are planning the school's very first racially integrated senior prom. The school has long had separate proms for the black and white students. This year's seniors decided to make their class an instrument of change. I highly commend them, but wonder why it took until 2007 for a class to do something like this. I thought this kind of thing ended years ago. If this class of seniors have set the bar for successive classes, they will have moved their community out of the dark past of segregation and closer to a world envisioned by Dr. Martin Luther King, who said:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Let Freedom Ring!