Aisha Tyler To Tackle Racial Issues In 'For One Night'

Aisha Tyler (Mia Dickerson) will soon star opposite of Raven Symone in the Lifetime original movie, For One Night.

The telefilm tells the real-life story of Gerica McCrary, a black student at Taylor County High. In 2002, McCrary forced the student body to vote on whether to end the school's 31-year-old tradition of segregated proms. The high school held two different proms - one for white students and a second one for minorities. A Dateline report on the story gave way for it to be turned into a movie.

To familiarize herself with the story, Tyler was given the original Dateline report. "I was watching it with some friends and I sat up and said: 'When was this?'," the actress told the Times Picayune. "And I realized that this is an important story to tell. People have to understand that these things still happen and people still have these kinds of discomforts and they manifest themselves sometimes in extreme and surprising ways."

Tyler will portray Shandra Hill Smith, a reporter and former Taylor County High student who befriends McCrary and becomes her mentor. For One Night stars Raven Symone as Gerica McCrary.

Tyler hopes the message behind For One Night is easy to grasp. "There are still many places and many people that haven't fully embraced some of the fundamental principles of American culture, which are acceptance and tolerance, equality and freedom of expression and association."

To read the original article and learn more about the TV movie, visit the Times Picayune.

Discuss this news item at Talk CSI!
 Add CSI Files RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a Desperate Housewives fan? Then visit GetDesperate.com!