By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: August 25, 1994

Under a lowering gray sky, the 600-odd students of Randolph County High trooped into the charred remnants of their school today for the first day of classes and, many hoped, a fresh attempt at racial peace in Wedowee, a troubled rural hamlet in the Appalachian foothills.

Indeed, there were plenty of assertions of new-found harmony from local school officials, before and after the shortened first day. “It was like a family,” said the new assistant principal, Lucille Burns, who is black, after the school day ended at midmorning. “We’re healing.”

Students leaving classes, some held in spartan, hastily furnished trailers, said the day had gone smoothly, and young blacks and whites appeared to come and go in peace, though usually in separate racial groups.

“Everybody’s getting along good, better now than when we got out last year,” said Tracy Harmon, a senior.

But underneath there were plenty of signs that the Aug. 5 fire, an unsolved arson, left intact the racial antagonisms that have festered here since February, when the principal Hulond Humphries’s concern about interracial dating turned this street of motley brick buildings into an unwilling national symbol of old and new South in collision. A Volunteer Effort

Now, a kind of irritable calm prevails in this town of 800. A great burst of cooperative energy was required to outfit the 10 trailers sitting in the school parking lot with plywood entrances and supplies. But some commented ruefully that few blacks volunteered.

“What was hurting was there weren’t any black people helping out,” said a white, James O’Rear, assembling a chalkboard on Tuesday evening. Then he exhorted a young black man, Mark Chapple, working beside him, to explain why he was volunteering.

“I’m going to get paid from the Lord,” Mr. Chapple said.

Nothing illustrates the lingering racial gap more clearly than sharply split attitudes toward Mr. Humphries. It was six months ago that Mr. Humphries, accused for years by blacks of racial bias, threatened to cancel the senior prom if there was interracial dating and was accused of telling a mixed-race student that her birth had been a mistake.

That led to months of marches, boycotts and the fire, culminating today in what for townspeople was the surreal spectacle of their children assembling in the muggy morning under a bank of television cameras and reporters, kept off school grounds by grim local police officers.