By Jacky Rowland BBC Correspondent in Taylor County, Georgia

A last bastion of segregation between blacks and whites in the South of the United States has fallen.

More than 40 years after the beginning of the civil rights movement, the Taylor County High School in the state of Georgia has held its first mixed-race prom, the annual school dance.

Some people think we are racists and we hate each other - but it's not like that

High School junior Mindy

At the local hair salon, the curling tongs were heating up and the hairspray was at the ready.

Hayley, Colby and Mindy, three white girls in the junior year of Taylor County High, were determined to look their best.

Mindy was not sure about the Shirley Temple ringlets the hair dresser had just given her.

But she was sure that Friday night would dispel some prejudices about Taylor County.

"Some people think we are racists and we hate each other," Mindy said.

"But it's not like that. It's just how things have always been here."

Changing times

When Enola Ross, a black woman in her 40s, graduated from high school, there was a separate prom for the black kids.

And it was a girls-only dance, so it wasn't much fun at all.

Thirty years later, she found herself helping her 16-year-old daughter, Lacey, get ready for a much bigger night out.

Black students used to have a girls-only dance

While Lacey sat under the hairdryer for an hour, her mother laid her party dress out on the bed.

It was powder-blue, long and shimmery, with a plunging back and a fish-tail hem.

"She's going to look gorgeous," said Enola. "Like a queen."

Lacey's older sister, Lakenya, helped her choose the dress.

She and her classmates wanted an integrated prom when they graduated seven years ago.

But Lakenya says the parents were against it - and it is the same with the taboo subject of mixed race dating.

"There's no black and white dating," she says. "At least, not out in the open. It's been like this for years. This town is afraid of change."

Small-town kids

As the afternoon moved into evening, the white kids in their long dresses and tuxedos assembled in the parking lot outside the Piggly Wiggly grocery store.

Revolutionary idea: "We study together, so why can't we party together?"

And then the stretch limousine pulled up.

You would never have guessed it from the glitz and the long white car, but the teenagers were small-town kids from poor families - and they were gearing up for what was probably the biggest night of their lives.

Forty-five minutes later, the stretch limo pulled up at the hotel where the prom was to take place, to an ecstatic welcome from parents and friends.

The kids had been preparing for months - ever since one black girl, Gerica McCrary, had a revolutionary idea: we study together, so why can't we party together?

New tradition

"There were many, many obstacles but that's what comes with change," said Gerica, as she stood in the hotel lobby wearing a long, blue sequined evening gown.

"The obstacles we came upon weren't anything that we couldn't deal with."

There were no mixed-race couples at this first integrated prom.

But it was clear that relations between blacks and whites in the South have changed since the old days - and so have the dance moves.

The students at Taylor County High hope they've begun a new tradition - and the choice of a white Prom Queen and a black Prom King seemed a good start.