Racism continues to be a major issue in America despite the election of Barack Obama as President. A prime example of deep-seated generational racism was on display in the HBO documentary Prom Night in Mississippi. The film explores the tiny community of Charleston, Miss. which until 2008 used to h have separate proms for white and back students.

Living in Massachusetts, the notion that segregation still exists in 21st Century America is somewhat shocking. Schools have been integrated (slowly) since the mid-50′s, but some are still clinging to an antiquated and anachronistic life which maintains the plantation era status quo.

Oscar winning actor Morgan Freeman, who has a home in Charleston attempted unsuccessfully to integrate the prom as early as 1997 but was continually rebuffed by the local school board. Freeman even offered to pay for the prom himself, but it wasn’t until he showed up with a documentary film crew that officials in Charleston agreed to hold an integrated prom.

Change, racially speaking, moves at a sub-glacial pace in Charleston. Even though SCOTUS had officially ended public school segregation in 1954 with the landmark 9-0 decision, Brown v. Board of Education, Charleston didn’t integrate its school system until 1970.

Katya Wachtel reviewed the film for Huffington Post and noted that:

Tallahatchie County is one of the poorest in the United States; more than 34 per cent of Charleston’s inhabitants live below the poverty line. It’s a town steeped in the blood of confederacy slave policy, where the hanging of blacks in the town square was an unexceptional event in the early 1900s. A Mississippi State flag, emblazoned with the symbolism-soaked confederate flag, flanks the ‘Stars and Stripes’ on a flagpole in the center of a town where 60 percent of the inhabitants are black. That percentage is higher at the local high school where 70% of the students are African-American.

The timing of the release of the film earlier this week is auspicious given three events this month that painfully remind us that racism is still a factor in this country and President Obama does not change that equation. I am referring to the Sotomayor hearings, the arrest of prominent scholar Dr. Henry Louis Gates in his own home, and the refusal of a Philadelphia area swim club to allow black day campers from using their pool for fear of changing the club’s "complexion."

Wachtel, like myself, seems genuinely shocked by the attitude of some Charleston residents:

There is something so jarring about a segregated prom in 2008, when the documentary was filmed. It’s not as if we’re unaware that racism still runs rampant in this country — between Sotomayor’s Supreme Court hearings and newly published photos of a still healthy Ku Klux Klan, you can’t avoid it. But there’s something about this bastion of segregation at Charleston High that is so loathsome to watch, and perhaps it has something to do with the innocence-of-youth factor; that basically at the end of the day, these young, hopeful black students are told by a white coterie, "Okay, thanks for coming; it was great going to school with you all these years, but as for celebrating this milestone, we don’t want to share it with you."

Filmmaker Paul Saltzman noted that his interest in Mississippi dates back to his days volunteering for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 60′s where he helped register Blacks to vote despite death threats:

I was curious to see how things had changed in Mississippi and I went back to check it out, with no idea of making a film. Through a mutual friend, I met Morgan Freeman and after spending a day together my wife and co-producer, Patricia Aquino, and I decided to self-finance a feature documentary called ‘Return to Mississippi.’ This is a road trip movie of my going back to Mississippi and filming with, among others, Morgan Freeman and Harry Belafonte.

While we were finishing that film I heard about a Mississippi high school that had been integrated since 1970 but was still holding separate white and black proms, which coincidentally happened to be in Morgan Freeman’s hometown. I called Morgan and asked him, is it true that they still hadseparate proms and he said yes, in fact that he had offered to pay for the whole prom if they would integrate it and no one took him up on it. That was in 1997. I asked him, "Is the offer still good?" And there was this wonderful pause on the other end of the phone and he said, "Oh…okay". And just like that the offer was back on the table only this time the school board agreed. My wife Patricia and I loaded up our car with gear and drove down from Toronto to Mississippi and with our Associate Producer, Thabi Moyo, we rented a place and basically filmed for four and a half months until the prom was over.

According to Saltzman, the difference between reading about the segregation and seeing it in person was unsettling:

I knew going in that there had been separate proms all these years and that much of that had to do with fear of change, and fear that by stirring up the racial question somehow the horrid past would come forward again. And what I learned is that people in Charleston (and I believe this is true everywhere) do not really talk about the kind of issues that lie under the surface, that often control our behavior.

So while Mississippi has come a long way since the days of slavery, it also started much further behind and in some ways it therefore still is behind. When we asked people to share their feelings with us, especially young people, we got a true sense of what was going on and what people were feeling in the community.

Saltzman laments that a number of white students and their families which either attended just the white-only prom or forbade their children from attending the integrated prom refused to be interviewed for the film. Wachtel notes that their decision to not be interviewed deprived the audience of understanding their rationale:

But Prom Night misses the voice of the staunchly pro-segregation whites, and it’s those voices we are dying to hear. We hear about their bigotry from their children, and their children’s friends, but Saltzman’s team was forbidden from going anywhere near them or their all-white gatherings as soon as filming commenced. So, the few white parents we meet in Prom Night are not George Wallace incarnates. Not even close. The racism here is far more simplistic than that. As one mother of a white student explains, "My grandmother always told us we were all put on this earth different, and when we all start integrating there’s not going to be anymore individuality… And if that’s the way god wanted us he would have made us all the same to start with."

Indeed, while Wachtel, myself, my wife, and millions of viewers on HBO found the film inspirational, the joy of those that dared to change decades of status-quo racism appeared to be short lived:

But how uplifted can you truly be, knowing that the following year, Charleston High School had another all-white prom. Or that Saltzman’s film, far from capturing a dying tradition, taps into a new era of educational segregation in this country, with recent reports that conclude the nation’s schools are more racially segregated now than at any other time since 1954. Which makes Prom Night in Mississippi that much more important to watch.

IMO the plantation attitude of these families in Charleston seems based on the outdated concept of miscegination.

It must be such a horrible thing for a mixed race couple to have a child that could end up being President of the United States.

Snip.

A version of this article appears on Daily Kos.