Georgia teen visits Winnipeg to see prom dress on display in CMHR
A Georgia teenager visited Winnipeg for the first time Saturday to take in a special exhibit at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR).
Nineteen-year-old Mareisha Rucker and her family made the trek north to see her red prom dress on display.
Rucker’s dress is displayed behind glass in the museum’s Inspiring Change gallery, a symbol commemorating the fact that she organized the first racially integrated prom at her high school in 2013.
“I really appreciate all of this,” said Rucker. “I wanted to go to prom with all of my friends, period. To me it was not a big deal, I was like, 'This is normal, I am going to go to prom with you all and we are going to ignore all the people who don’t want to go to prom with us.'”
Matthew McRae with the CMHR said it was an easy decision to put the dress on display.
"What can change look like?" said McRae. "'It can look like a prom dress' is a pretty neat answer, I think, and a pretty unexpected one. So I think it fit because in some ways it was so unexpected because it showed us in a way how far we still have to go."
A family history of challenging conventions
Rucker's grandmother, Brenda Madison, was the first African American woman elected to the town's school board in 1996.
“I had a cross burned in my front yard when I decided that I would run,” said Madison. “Someone set our pump house on fire hoping it would get to the house.
“We had all kinds of [derogatory] phone calls … sometimes somebody has to take that whipping in order to bring change.”
She was worried about what her granddaughter would be up against.
“My goodness my mind went back and I thought to myself from my own struggle, ‘Wow, do you know what you're up against?’ She was like, "Well angel, you did it," said Madison.
Not everyone was immediately happy to hear there was going to be an integrated prom.
"A lot of the older white people that are in our county, they weren't happy at all," said Rucker. "I had teachers at my school that no longer spoke to me."
But Rucker said the atmosphere at her school has changed for the better since wearing the dress to that precedent-setting prom.
“It's better, it's not as bad as it was, but you know as long as we keep moving forward, we keep pushing, my town, my county will be a lot better, it will be a good thing.”
