Students flock to Georgia high school's first EVER racially integrated prom

For the first time in the history of Wilcox County, Georgia, black students and white students danced arm-in-arm at prom on Saturday. Nearly 60 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was illegal, half of the students from rural Wilcox County High School ended their community's tradition of segregation after raising money for an integrated prom dance. The event had all the trappings of a normal high school prom, with couples arriving together in limousines, girls decked in frilly dresses, and badly-synchronized group dances to modern dance hits. Not all of the couples were integrated. Mostly, black students dated black students and white students dated white students, but all of the teens said that the night held a special significance. 

'I didn't agree with the fact that they separated blacks and whites. so I just put my foot down and said, "No, I'm not going to and all-white prom and I'm not going to go with somebody to an all-black prom, it's just not going to happen,'" one student, a white girl with a black prom date, told WMAZ-TV. 

'I'm not going to go until everybody can be together.'

For decades, the school district has avoided throwing an officially-sanctioned prom so that the parents could organize separate, segregated dances for the students.

This year, though, four friends - two black and two white - joined together to end the practice.

They started a Facebook campaign called 'Integrated Prom' and it quickly gained more than 26,000 followers. Donations poured in from across the country and DJs and motivational speakers from Atlanta and other major volunteered their time for the prom at the south Georgia high school, which only has about 400 students. 

'It turned out really well, I didn't even know this many people were coming, but I guess there was a lot of tickets being sold,' Quanesha Wallace, an organizer of the prom, told WMAZ. 

Many white students opted not to attend the whites-only prom, which was held last week, so that they could go to the integrated prom Saturday night.

'Hopefully when everything is said and done, people in our county will really realize, that there is no sense in the way things are right now,' Mareshia Rucker, another organizer, told ABC News. 

The school board has announced that it will adopt a formal, school-sanctioned prom for 2014, which would be integrated - by law. 

That would likely spell the end, once and for all, to one of the last remaining bastions of official segregation in the South.