"MISSISSIPPI GOES NORTH"

 “MISSISSIPPI GOES NORTH”

When I was in junior high school, I was a basketball fan, but with my vertical challenges (5’3”), I could only play in pick-up games.  My favorite college player during those years was Bailey Howell, a 6’7” player at Mississippi State in Starkville. MSU at that time had all-white teams, and Howell was one of the best in the country.  The team won a couple of SEC conference titles, and because of that, they were eligible to participate in March Madness, the NCAA basketball tournament, which would determine the national champion.  But, if MSU went to the tournament, they likely would have to play teams with Black players, so there was an informal Mississippi rule that MSU could not play any teams with Black players.  Even captive as I was to white supremacy, I wanted Howell and his MSU team to go play in the tournament.  Howell and his teammates wanted to play, too, but the university and the state of Mississippi would not permit it.

That would change in 1963, and as March Madness starts again this week, I want to give the background story to that 1963 decision.  The MSU team would again win the SEC Conference title in 1963 and were invited to the NCAA tournament.  They would be playing Loyola of Chicago in an early round of the NCAA tournament, and Loyola had Black players.  The legislature of Mississippi once again declined the invitation for MSU, but this time the coach (James “Babe” McCarthy),  the players, and even the president of MSU refused to submit to the legislative will.  That refusal began a chain of events and subterfuge which resulted in the MSU team going to play Loyola in the NCAA tournament in East Lansing, Michigan.  This week is the 60th anniversary of that “Game of Change,” as it came to be called.

It was a volatile time in the South, with many changes already coming, and many to come.  Only 7 months earlier, there had been a white race riot at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, in response to one of the citizens of Mississippi, James Meredith, wanting to attend school at his home university.  It took a host of US Marshals and US Army troops to put down the riot and to allow Meredith to attend Ole Miss.  Just one month after March Madness in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., would write his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” in the midst of SCLC’s campaign for basic human rights for Black people in that city.  King would be the headline speaker only a few months later at the March on Washington, which drew 250,000 people to DC.  

In March of 1963, MSU president Dean W. Colvard announced that the MSU men’s basketball team would accept the invitation to participate in the NCAA tournament.   His decision sparked an immediate negative reaction from the Mississippi legislature, with one rep saying that “This action follows the Meredith incident as an admission that Mississippi State has capitulated and is willing for the Negroes to move into that school en masse.”  The state college board announced that it would hold a special session to review President Colvard’s decision, but in a surprise move, the board approved the decision by an 8-3 vote.  Governor Ross Barnett and the legislature opposed the decision.  On the afternoon of March 13, 1963, several Mississippi state legislators obtained an injunction from the county court forbidding the team from leaving the state to play in the game – it was issued two days before the game was scheduled to be played.

Coach McCarthy had been to this rodeo before, so he and President Colvard were ready. They left the state before the injunction could be served on them.  On March 14, the team sent the trainer and five reserve players to the Starkville airport to see if the sheriff’s office was guarding against their departure.  When they found no sheriff’s rep there, the rest of the MSU team quickly arrived to take a charter flight to Nashville, Tennessee, out of reach from the court injunction.  In Nashville they met Coach McCarthy and the rest of the staff, and from there they flew up to East Lansing to play Loyola of Chicago on March 15.  The governor and legislators were outraged, but the team was on its way to Michigan.  Later in the day, in no small irony, a justice on the Mississippi Supreme Court dissolved the injunction, saying that it had no basis in law.

All of this was covered heavily in the Southern and national media, and I was glad that MSU was on its way.  It was an historic game on March 15, 1963, and next week I’ll give some background to the MSU opponent Loyola of Chicago. They had their own difficult encounters with the demonic power of racism, but they persevered and ultimately prevailed.  College basketball began dramatic changes with that Game of Change.