realthog

The Oscar-winning actor heard about the segregated proms in 1997 and promptly offered Charleston High School the money to fund a dance for all races to attend. Film cameras were rolling when the school board finally took him up on the offer in 2008.      

Director Paul Saltzman's "Prom Night in Mississippi," which premiered Saturday as part of the world documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival, chronicles the growing pains Charleston went through last year as the community prepared for its first racially integrated senior prom.      

The move came 54 years after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education case that struck down school segregation and more than 30 years after black students began attending Charleston High School, which previously had been all-white.

So why'm I saying this is a heartwarming story? Sure, while Freeman's generosity and his sterling work to end this sort of crap are admirable (and he's one of my all-time fave actors anyway), it hardly cheers the soul that it's taken a bunch of small-minded bigots something like half a century to see the light, or that the local law enforcement in Charleston, Miss., turned a blind eye to what was surely illegal discrimination -- does it?

No, what brings joy is the next sentence of the report:

Freeman said students were willing to go with an integrated prom when he made the offer 11 years ago, but the school board and parents ignored his offer.

Increasingly, the new generations are rejecting the racist bigotry of the old, and meanwhile the bigots themselves are dying. Now there's a cause for celebration.