Todd M. Gaither

ESPN's College GameDay is in Oxford, Mississippi this Saturday for LSU and Ole Miss, and the celebrity guest picker is Morgan Freeman. He's there because he's a Mississippi guy. He grew up in the state and has lived in Charleston, a Delta town of about 2,100 people, since 1991. He's said he feels safer there than anywhere else in America. Here's what he did in that town that almost nobody outside of it knows. Mississippi integrated its public schools in 1970. Charleston High School integrated with them. Black students and white students went to class together, played on the same teams, grew up side by side from kindergarten on. But the prom stayed separate. It wasn't school policy. Parents organized it privately. One prom for the Black students, one for the white students, every single year, for decades after the classrooms had been integrated. That was still happening in 1997. So Morgan Freeman went to the school and made an offer. He would personally pay for the entire senior prom. Every dollar. One condition. Everybody comes. The school ignored him. He let it sit for eleven years. Then in 2008 he went back and offered again. This time the school board said yes. Charleston High School had 415 students, about 70% Black and 30% white, in Tallahatchie County, the poorest county in Mississippi. In April 2008, they held the first racially integrated prom in the school's history. Freeman paid for all of it and then mostly got out of the way. He didn't want it to be about him. Not everyone came along. A group of white parents held a secret meeting and organized a separate whites-only prom at a local National Guard facility, and some of them forbade their kids from attending the integrated one. Freeman was clear-eyed about why. He said the parents were the hard part, that they'd settled into a that's-the-way-it-is attitude that doesn't move. The kids were different. "In other words, you can sell them another idea." A Canadian filmmaker named Paul Saltzman heard about it, moved his family to Charleston for four months, and filmed the whole thing. The documentary is called Prom Night in Mississippi. HBO aired it in 2009. The prom happened. The kids had a great night. Several of them said afterward they couldn't understand what the adults had been so afraid of. Freeman was 71 years old when he finally got that yes. He'd been offering since he was 60. On Saturday he'll be on a stage in Oxford in front of a few hundred thousand people, picking football games. He already did the harder thing, in a town of 2,100, where nobody was watching.