MSU, Loyola game historic

Opinion

June 16, 2012

MSU, Loyola game historic

By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Sat Jun 16, 2012, 08:01 PM CDT

STARKVILLE — In the 1950s and 1960s, most of the national headlines being made by Mississippi’s “Big Three” universities were negative and focused in great measure on either institutional racism, mob violence, or both.

In 1962, James Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss led to three days of riots that left two dead and more than 180 injured. The riots and the killings of a Paul Guihard — a British journalist for a French news agency — and local jukebox repairman Walter Ray Gunter made Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss a matter that required the intervention of President John F. Kennedy and the federalization of the Mississippi National Guard.

At Mississippi Southern College, Clyde Kennard was falsely convicted and imprisoned in 1960 on trumped up charges that he stole chicken feed. That atrocity came after Kennard tried unsuccessfully to integrate what would become the University of Southern Mississippi in 1956, 1957, and 1959. USM was integrated without incident in 1965 when the school admitted black students Gwendolyn Elaine Armstrong and Raylawni Branch.

The integration of Mississippi State University in 1965 when Richard Holmes was admitted was by comparison to the fate of Kennard and the experiences of Meredith a surprisingly peaceful affair that took place without violence.

But other than for the raw courage it took for Holmes to break the color barrier at MSU, his admittance was in truth almost anti-climactic because of a basketball game played more than two years prior. The game was a historic NCAA basketball tournament game between Mississippi State and Loyola University of Chicago on March 23, 1963.

That game was only six months removed from the Meredith riots at Ole Miss. Kennard was still languishing in Parchman for daring to try to integrate USM. In 1963, MSU’s players and coaches had to sneak out of the state against a court order prohibiting them from playing against a school with black players.

As I noted in the book “Jack Cristil: Voice of the MSU Bulldogs” in 2011: “For many, the courage that (former MSU President Dean W.) Colvard and (legendary MSU head basketball coach Babe ) McCarthy showed in defying the Mississippi Legislature and fiery segregationist Gov. Ross Barnett to enable the all-white MSU men’s basketball team to compete against a Loyola team with four African-American starters represented the university’s finest hours. For many, Mississippi State’s 1962-63 basketball team, coach, and the university administration came together to create a defining moment not only for MSU athletics but for American civil rights and universal sportsmanship as well.”

A half-century later, Mississippi’s political, social, and racial landscapes are vastly different. While race remains problematic in some corners, the “closed society” that James Silver wrote about at Ole Miss in 1964 has been dramatically expanded and changed.

USM’s enrollment is 29 percent African American, while MSU has 21 percent African American enrollment (highest among U.S. historically white land grant institutions) and Ole Miss has 16 percent African-American enrollment.

Ole Miss hosted a 2008 U.S. presidential debate that featured the Democratic nominee who would become America’s first African-American president. USM hosts one of the nation’s most dynamic civil rights oral history repositories. And MSU is now one of five universities to host a presidential library — the U.S. Grant Presidential Library at that.

MSU is working on a rematch basketball game with Loyola University 50 years after that historic 1963 game that clearly has implications far deeper than mere basketball. Loyola won the 1963 game 61-51 and would go on to win the 1963 NCAA national championship.

Loyola team captain Jerry Harkness, one of the four black starters for the Ramblers, best summed up the true motivation for MSU before the game was played: “The (MSU) players are all right. I think that Mississippi State wants to play us. If they don’t, they’ll never know how good they are.”

Harkness, the Loyola All-American, and State’s All-SEC team captain Joe Dan Gold met at center court in Michigan State’s old Jenison Field House for the opening tip in 1963. Gold extended his hand and Harkness shook it — and Mississippi would never be the same again.

(Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him at 601-507-8004 or sidsalter@sidsalter.com)

Text Only

Opinion

Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.”

March 29, 2013
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist

Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.

March 29, 2013
VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008.

March 27, 2013
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists

When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”

March 27, 2013
Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing.

March 23, 2013
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered.

March 23, 2013
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun

The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral.

March 22, 2013
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.

March 22, 2013
Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.

March 20, 2013
Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist

Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.

March 20, 2013
More Opinion Headlines

Opinion

Search Results

MSU, Loyola game historic

Site Map

Contact Us