Where I went to school we had a school-sponsored Prom. There were some folks who elected not to attend, and held their own private parties instead. There was a black one, a white one, one attended by both blacks and whites who considered themselves "blue bloods" (I went to a public school in St. Louis that had a lot of old money in it). And there was a 4th one for the hippies (real hippies, not some retro wanna-be imitation shit) who had a great big blast sans tuxes and formals (and clothes entirely, at some points).
I'll let you speculate on which one I attended.
I think that the fact that governmental entities like this school board continue to engage in this kind of gamesmanship to avoid coming into the 1970s is a sad commentary on the people involved. I agree that how people chose to feel "ain't nobody's bidnez but there own" - one of the advantages of living in a free country is that even the ignorant are free to believe what they want.
And there is no regional bias in my attitude - I live in the middle of corn country where Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa meet, and I've heard the N word from white folks more in the two years I've been here than I have in 20 years. We recently had a school consolidation come up and one of the quiet arguements for it was to keep the local kids from going to school with "them" from the nearby "city" - (the nearby city has a population of 17,000, with maybe 5% of that split between black, hispanic, and other minorities).
I taught my girls to date good people, and I taught them that deciding someone was good or bad because of the color of their skin, their religion, how much money they had, or where they came from was ignorant. I was more than a little suprised by my own attitudes when they "took me up on it." I didn't unlearn my own father's lessons quite as thoroughly as I thought I had - but I got over it.