Principal’s Race Comments Spur Small-Town Uproar : Bias: Alabamian suspended in furor over interracial dating and prom. He called mixed-race girl a ‘mistake.’

It is a bucolic little town, nestled amid the foothills of eastern Alabama. There is one traffic light, one drugstore and one high school, which Tuesday sat empty, testament to the silent power of forces that roil beneath Wedowee’s placid surface.

“Parents are jumpy. The kids are jumpy,” said Dale McKay, the superintendent. He ordered the school closed after the school board, in a raucous, jam-packed meeting, suspended the principal Monday night. “We have to look out for the safety of the kids.”

What got things stirred up was the collision of race and sex at the high school. In the South this has always been a combustible mixture. What is happening in Wedowee shows that it has lost none of its flammability.

Last month, school principal Hulond Humphries called an assembly and, according to students, asked if anyone planned to attend the April 23 prom with a date of a different race.

“A majority raised their hands,” said Karen Parker, a 16-year-old junior. “They really weren’t going to go with who they said they were going with,” she said. “We just wanted to see what he was going to say.”

Students who attended the assembly say Humphries declared that he would cancel the prom rather than allow mixed couples to attend. One student, ReVonda Bowen, whose mother is black but whose father is white, stood up and asked what race her date should be. She broke into tears when Humphries reportedly said his edict was designed to keep more “mistakes” like her from happening.

Humphries reversed himself the next day and said the prom could go on, but by then civil rights organizations were calling for his resignation.

Only 800 people live in Wedowee (pronounced Wuh-DOW-wee), which sits amid forested hills and lakes near Alabama’s border with Georgia. But more than 500 people packed the school’s auditorium Monday night for the long-anticipated meeting.

The seven-member school board voted in favor of suspending Humphries with pay pending an investigation after the school district’s attorney advised that they had little choice. Although everyone seemed more or less satisfied with the board’s action, it only postponed a decision that is bound to split the community--whether Humphries should be fired.

Humphries, who has worked at the school for 25 years, has strong support among whites in the county, who form the majority of its 20,000 population. The Randolph County High School has a student body of 680 that is 62% white. Earlier Monday, one white member of the board, which contains only one black member, said he believed that the majority of the board supported the principal.

McKay, the superintendent, said he also is “in sympathy” with Humphries. McKay said the principal wanted to cancel the prom because he had been concerned about recent racial tensions in the school. Humphries had blamed racial problems for at least one fight between students. The principal, who has refused to comment since the incident, feared fighting might break out if there was interracial dating at the prom, McKay said.

“I had talked with him about the possibility of not having a prom,” said McKay, who indicated that he supported the decision. “I didn’t realize he was going to tell them the way he told them, if he did tell them that way.”

This isn’t the first time Humphries has gotten into controversy over civil rights issues. A report by the U.S. Education Department’s civil rights office admonished him in 1989 for, among other things, encouraging black and white students to ride separate buses to the county vocational school, disciplining disproportionate numbers of black students and disciplining blacks more harshly than whites for the same offenses.

He was cited for using suspensions as the punishment of first resort for black students while white students were often punished by paddling, which kept them from missing days in school.

The school board promised to end the discriminatory practices, but local blacks say the acts continued.

Among those attending Monday’s school board meeting were the Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, and Earl Shinhoster, Southeastern regional director of the NAACP. They praised the board’s decision to suspend Humphries and said their organizations would monitor the board’s investigation of complaints against the principal.

The investigation is expected to last two weeks.

Also at the meeting, surrounded by a handful of burly followers, was Nathan Thomaston, who said he was a great titan of the Ku Klux Klan from Georgia. “We’re here to stay,” he said belligerently to a reporter.

“If (Humphries) said it, I think he was sticking up for the Bible,” Thomaston said of the principal’s short-lived ban on interracial dating. “The Bible teaches against things like that, from Genesis all the way through.”

McKay said he fears the entrance of outside groups could polarize the community and incite violence.

“Everybody is concerned whenever people on either the far right or the far left come in,” he said. “. . . it’s the radicals that cause the problems.

“I’m not saying the Ku Klux Klan is radical, but you know they’re known for their beliefs.”

While audience members were mostly well-behaved at Monday’s meeting, security was tight, with police, county deputies and state patrol officers stationed around the school and patrolling the town.

Metal detectors screened everyone entering the building for weapons.

McKay said there had been a bomb threat at the school earlier in the day.

One man was arrested when he left the building and then tried to re-enter through a side door with a .25-caliber automatic handgun, said Randolph County Sheriff Larry Colley.

Otherwise, Colley pronounced the meeting “peaceful, very disciplined. Everyone left happy.”

The audience largely segregated itself by race. Whites, who were outnumbered 2 to 1, were mostly supporters of Humphries. One woman presented the school board with a petition bearing the signatures of 1,800 Humphries supporters.

Many of the whites present had been among those who formed a 100-car motorcade Saturday through downtown to show their support. The cars bore signs saying: “Go Hulond,” “Humphries for Governor” and “Humphries for President.”

Although Humphries’ supporters said he tried to ban interracial dating because he feared racial violence, several black students said whites and blacks at the school generally got along well.

Shay Holloway, a 17-year-old black junior who was involved in the fight with a white girl that school officials cite as evidence of racial trouble, insisted Tuesday that race had nothing to do with the fight.

She said the principal is the main cause of racial troubles at the school.

“There was some racial tension,” she said, “but not as much as there is now.”