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.



Twenty-seven years have passed since that conversation. Bettye and her son recently traveled back to Macon to face something that's been omnipresent their whole lives: the coming together of white and black.



They returned for a one-of-a-kind 50th high school gathering. The classes of 1959, once segregated by race as well as gender, sat down together for the first time in history.



Ruby Dean Dupree Mayes arrived two hours early for the festivities. She didn't sleep the night before.



"It's like waiting for Santa Claus to arrive. I'm so excited," said Mayes, who drove more than 330 miles from Tennessee to attend.



Mayes went to Ballard-Hudson High, the city's black high school, whose most famous students include singers Otis Redding and Little Richard. She came this day "to celebrate and commemorate."



"I could not pass this event up," she said. "I never dreamed of this moment -- just the realization of knowing that we had come together, at last."



As the 1959 graduates arrived, they welcomed one another. Many first greeted people of their own race. Some hadn't seen particular classmates in the 50 years since they earned their diplomas. Gradually, they began mixing and mingling.



There was a commonality -- a need to come together for their children, their grandchildren and the generations to follow. Discuss the past, while moving forward in the present.



Separated now by 'personal choice'



It sometimes takes a son to see things in a new light.



The idea for the meeting began four years ago, when a son told his father: "Dad, think about how many friends you missed getting to know."



Those were the words of Wyatt Johnson, a public school teacher in Santa Cruz, California. He and his father, Tom Johnson, were enjoying a father-son trip to Macon in 2005 to rediscover their roots.



Tom Johnson is the former head of CNN and was once the publisher of the Los Angeles Times. He's traveled the world and left his own mark along the way. Yet despite all his accomplishments, there was something he'd never done: reach out to the African-Americans of Macon from 1959, the ones he never knew because of segregation.



An idea was born. He wrote to graduates of the black school, Ballard-Hudson; the white girls' school, Miller; and the white boys' school, Lanier. "We all have deep personal memories of our high school experiences that will remain with us forever," he wrote. "We had lived in a separate black and white world in Macon. ... It is a different world today. We no longer are separated, except by personal choice."



One white graduate responded with hate mail, a reminder that racism still exists.



But on a day in early October, more than 200 people gathered at a Goodwill banquet hall. There was no shouting, none of the in-your-face name-calling seen in recent health care town hall meetings across the country.



Here, there were tears, hugs and handshakes. Often, talk of grandkids took center stage at the 16 roundtables. They talked about race and the segregated past that prevented such
Where did students from former segregated schools unite? What did Ruby Dean Dupree Mayes say? Who reunited in Macon, Georgia? Who said "I never dreamed of this moment"?
Macon "It's like waiting for Santa Claus to arrive. I'm so excited," the 1959 graduates Ruby Dean Dupree Mayes
question: Where did students from former segregated schools unite?, answer: Macon | question: What did Ruby Dean Dupree Mayes say?, answer: "It's like waiting for Santa Claus to arrive. I'm so excited," | question: Who reunited in Macon, Georgia?, answer: the 1959 graduates | question: Who said "I never dreamed of this moment"?, answer: Ruby Dean Dupree Mayes