By JANE GROSS with RONALD SMOTHERS
Published: August 15, 1994

This two-stoplight town is America’s latest civil rights crucible, a speck on the map between Atlanta and Birmingham that has been riven by racial tension in the six months since a white high school principal threatened to cancel the prom to prevent interracial dating and was accused of telling a mixed-race student that her birth had been a mistake.

The challenge of Hulond Humphries, the 55-year-old principal, to the inexorable tide of social integration here and his disputed exchange with the student, 17-year-old Revonda Bowen, have uncovered deep racial divisions long hidden in Wedowee, a rural hamlet known for the easy friendships among its 800 residents and for the huge bass in its local lake.

The big fish are still jumping in Lake Wedowee, but blacks and whites are looking at each other through narrowed eyes these days outside the county courthouse, the grocery and the flower shop on Main Street, and especially around the charred husk of the high school, which was set afire by arsonists.

“It seems like a different place now,” said Ms. Bowen, who won a $25,000 settlement from the school district after her confrontation with Mr. Humphries but has since seen some of her relationships come unraveled amid the tumult. “Everything was quiet before. Now you can see everything, hear everything. Everything’s out in the open.” Sound and Fury

The racial tempest that began in February at Randolph County High School looks on the surface like a replay of anguished decades past. It has riled blacks, unsettled whites, turned school board meetings into racial shouting matches and led to bomb threats, school boycotts and sound and fury from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Ku Klux Klan.

The once-quiet four-block downtown is abustle with civil rights lawyers and curious journalists. The outsiders are welcomed by many of the blacks here, who are tired of having to hold their tongues when treated with condescension or contempt, but they are given a cold shoulder by most of the whites, who were well served by the status quo.