Macon, Georgia (CNN) -- Bettye Webb-Hayes won't ever forget the day her son posed a question that stopped her in her tracks. "Mom," the fourth-grader asked, "am I white?" It was a question she had never asked her own parents. It was something you didn't talk about in the days of the segregated South -- especially when your mom was white and your father was a mix of African-American and Native American. She went to the black schools of Macon, Georgia. Now, her son was asking probing questions. "Why would you ask me that?" she said. "Because everybody at school calls me a honky," said the young Cordell, a light-skinned African-American.
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Students from former segregated schools of 1959 unite in Macon, Georgia
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"I never dreamed of this moment," says Ruby Dean Dupree Mayes
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Michael Cass: "I'm glad we've left the past behind"
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The group hopes to set example for elders of other Southern cities
Macon
Macon
Macon
"We had lived in a separate black and white world in @placeholder.
Mom
For Bettye Webb-Hayes and her son, the gathering underscored why the question "@placeholder, am I white" could be asked in one era and not another.
Cordell
Listening to his mother and her childhood friends, @placeholder said, he was struck by how segregation was "was so transparent to them at the time they were living through it.