WEDOWEE, Ala. -- Mayor Terry Graham, who is white, looks at the fire-scorched rubble that is Randolph County High School and declares that there is no racial problem in his town.
"This town is the same as it was," he says. "The people are the same."
Janice Pinkard, the first black elected as the school's senior class president, in 1978, looks at the same charred building and sees this: a smashed symbol of a fractured community where whites rule and blacks keep their place.
"The whites would have you believe it's in harmony here," she says. "But you ask some of these white people, 'How many of you have invited us to dinner at your homes? How many of you have ever had dinner at our homes?' "
Something dreadful happened here.
In the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 6, a high school that had been at the center of a civil rights controversy was burned, a town's memory robbed and its heart broken. No one has yet been arrested for what federal investigators labeled an act of arson.
But how did it come to this?
The question hangs in the air like the hot, humid temperature of an Alabama summer day.
For six months, this tiny town of about 900 on the eastern edge of Alabama had been portrayed as a place caught in a time warp, where white and black lived under rules of an old racial order symbolized by the school's gruff, white, middle-aged principal.
The order finally cracked when Hulond Humphries, the principal, threatened on Feb. 24 to cancel the prom because of interracial dating. When he allegedly told a student that she was "a mistake," because her father was white and her mother black, Mr. Humphries unwittingly ripped the veil off the town's racial relations.
Now, Randolph County High School lies a charred ruin.
Now, there is a new school principal, Wayne Wortham, who is white; a new assistant principal, Lucille Burns, who is black; and a new school year approaching Aug. 22.
And there is also a committee formed to rebuild the school. It is headed by Mr. Humphries, given his reassignment Monday by the local school board.
"We need to just get together, now," Mr. Wortham said Friday as he pulled out a drill and began repairing a desk in an office space that connects the now charred high school with a #F still-standing kindergarten through third-grade building. "If we can get together, then things are going to get better."
But there are still festering resentments beneath the surface of what many here believed was a placid little Southern town, two-thirds white, one-third black, the races apparently mixing peacefully for years.
To understand what happened here, though, you have to understand the grip one principal had on this town and its children. Wedowee (pronounced wee-DOW-ee) is comfortable and friendly, a bass fisherman's paradise with a four-lane main street and homes that dot the rolling countryside.
Atlanta is two hours to the east, Birmingham is 90 minutes to the west and the nearest interstate is a half-hour away.
The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s nearly passed Wedowee by.
Since 1968, Mr. Humphries had been the principal and unquestioned ruler of the high school, overseeing two generations of the town's children, supervising the court-ordered integration of the system. He hired and fired the school's teachers -- there are now five blacks on the staff of 35. He set all the rules. He maintained student discipline, not just with a penetrating stare over his bifocals, but with a paddle.
In Alabama, corporal punishment isn't just accepted -- it's legal.
Mr. Humphries, 55, is beloved by many whites who see him as a wise disciplinarian. Yet he is apparently loathed by many blacks who say they bore the brunt of his punishment.
"Mr. Humphries is an institution here," said Jim Wilson, a City Council member. "There is no doubt about it -- he is a pretty tough disciplinarian. But I'd find it hard to believe he'd be extreme or prejudiced."
Folks tell stories about how Mr. Humphries gave poor children -- black and white -- lunch money. How he helped rebuild a local black-owned barbecue stand that had burned down. How he was racially tolerant, allowing a school production of "Bye Bye Birdie" to be staged in 1993 with a white female and black male in the lead romantic roles.
He may be a stern man, but he shows flashes of good humor and good cheer while holding court with his friends at the Hub, the local restaurant where farmers, gas station attendants, factory workers and lawyers mix daily.
Mr. Humphries is also emotional, weeping Wednesday when he spoke publicly for the first time about the controversy at the school. He declined to comment for this article.
"This has been a devastating fire and a trying time," he told the crowd of more than 300 residents who attended the news conference in front of the charred school.
Mrs. Pinkard and her father, Lawrence O'Neal, say that for years the black community resented Mr. Humphries.
"He helped black kids out, all right; he helped them right out of school," Mr. O'Neal said.
Mrs. Pinkard said she is still angry that Mr. Humphries declined to help her perform her job as senior class president.
"I've known the man," she said. "I've always known he was racist."
True or false, the perception that Mr. Humphries treated one race harshly apparently simmered in the black community. So the stage had long since been set for a confronta tion. It occurred on Feb. 24 when Mr. Humphries threatened to cancel the prom in the wake of a series of fights his supporters said stemmed from disputes over interracial dating.
When a mixed-race student, Rovonda Bowen, asked whom she should take to the prom, Mr. Humphries allegedly said that her parents made "a mistake" having her. His words echoed not just through the school auditorium, but throughout the nation.
Wedowee was news. And Wedowee was unprepared for the storm.
The entire spectacle -- a school boycott by blacks, demonstrations, charges and countercharges -- was played out through the unrelenting gaze of television, news magazines and newspapers. Wedowee became an easy target, a remnant of the Old South amid the new. But the truth was more difficult to uncover.
"That little community had developed a situation where interracial dating and marriages happened," said Brandt Ayers, publisher of the nearby Anniston Star. "There were no lynchings. No firebombings. No cross-burnings. All this took place in that little hamlet in the Deep South.
"And then, when this enormous engine of a national controversy hits this village, it's about as subtle as a circus calliope. When that sort of thing passes through a town, it sort of alters the face of the community and certainly the relationships among the people."
Eventually, the school board cut a deal with Ms. Bowen over a lawsuit, agreeing to pay her $25,000 for college. The television networks packed up their gear.
But the story still percolated through the summer in Wedowee.
Southern Christian Leadership Conference organizers continued to call and march for Mr. Humphries' ouster. One more march was planned for Aug. 6. But it never came off.
Early that Saturday, the town awoke to the wail of the volunteer fire department siren, and dozens followed the noise and smoke and fiery glow to the school atop the hill.
People hauled buckets and carried fire hoses. Others, like Mr. Humphries, raced into the adjoining building to retrieve educational records. But mostly, those gathered in the night just stood there and watched in disbelief.
Randolph County High School, built of hardwood and brick in 1937, occupied in 1938, burned to the ground.
"You kept saying to yourself, 'You know it's gone,' " said Mr. Wilson, the City Council member. "Yet you found yourself drawn to the building like a magnet. You found it hard to believe what you were seeing."
The town lost more than a building that housed 450 students from grades seven through 12, lost more than 12 classrooms, a computer lab and a science lab.
It lost a lot of memories.
The case filled with football trophies and a dozen retired jerseys.
A math trophy that Tiffany Humphries, a senior last year, helped win for her daddy, the school principal.
A note that English teacher Betty Bunn hung in her classroom. It said: "To Mrs. Bunn, I like you even if you are a teacher."
A week has past since flames engulfed the school, and the town is cleaning up the mess and absorbing the verdict of federal investigators that the fire was an act of arson.
Trailers will arrive next week, and they'll be transformed into temporary classrooms in the school parking lot. Bathrooms will be built. The rubble cleared.
Some students, like 16-year-old senior Heather Landry, are angry.
"It's not what I've been dreaming of for 12 years, to spend my senior year in a trailer," she said. "This is an unending mess. All because of lies. Because somebody said that somebody said that somebody said. It's not true. We don't have problems here."
Many in the town are still in a state of denial, unprepared even now to confront age-old racial questions.
"What makes our problem any different than anyone else's?" said Jimmy McCain, a graduate and former teacher at the school and owner of five stores. "Do you see a problem? We get along in this town."
Outwardly, yes, people get along. Blacks and whites greet each other warmly on the street. They play football together. They march in the band together. But . . .
"If you walked into this town six months ago before the controversy began, you would have walked into 1950," said the Rev. Henry Sterling of the SCLC. "You saw everyone get along well as long as you saw black people stay in their place. It was time for Wedowee to do the right thing for all its citizens."
There are signs of hope, of course. Blacks and whites are pitching in to clean up the school. Mr. Wortham, the new principal, is greeted warmly by parents, both black and white.
Jennifer Green, a black woman, came to the school Friday to help a relative register for the coming year. When she saw Mr. Wortham, she grabbed his arm and said: "When they named you principal, I said, 'Yeah.' "
"It's going to be different," said Mr. Wortham, a 1969 graduate of the high school.
Later, he told a reporter that this town, his hometown, was a wonderful place and that he hoped the country would come to learn of the beauty and peace that is Wedowee.
"If they told me I was going to be the governor of Alabama, I'd want the capital to be here," he said. "There are good people here."
Truly there are.
On the Monday after the fire, the Wedowee football team began to practice, running drills and ignoring the burned-out school on the hill. They finished up wind sprints and then knelt together, black and white, all reciting the Lord's Prayer.
"It takes a long time to get a good name, but it takes only one night to burn it all down," said tailback Lance Raughton. "We're going to get our good name back."
The football season begins Sept. 2. The Randolph County High School Tigers will be home in their stadium near the burned-out ** hulk of a school.
The stadium is named after Hulond Humphries.