The Change Game

In the fall of 1962 I watched on our black & white TV, along with my parents, the reports of violence at the University of Mississippi in protest of the enrollment of James Meredith as its first black student.  Updates came throughout the evening, we heard about the National Guard entering the campus, and the death of two people.

At the time I did not realize a significant and much more positive event regarding race relations took place only several months later, on March 15, 1963, involving Mississippi State University (MSU).

This was still a year before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when resistance against integration was still strong across the South.  Mississippi State fielded consistently strong basketball squads, winning the SEC championship in 1959, 1961, and 1962 but the state's unwritten policy prohibited them playing in the NCAA tournament where they would face integrated teams.

MSU won the SEC again in 1963.  This time coach James "Babe" McCarthy and university president Dean Colvard were determined their team would play in the tournament.  Despite their protests, the University Board and the Governor refused and a state judge was persuaded to issue a temporary injunction to prevent the team from leaving.  What happened next is told in an ESPN.com article:

But in perhaps the best end-around in sports history, Colvard directed McCarthy to head for the Tennessee state line and stay in Memphis while he traveled to Alabama for a speaking engagement to prevent the injunction from being served. The next day, an assistant coach ferried the freshmen and some of the reserve players to a private plane as decoys and, when they saw that the coast was clear, called for the rest of the team to join them.

"That was the nerve-racking part," Shows said. "We didn't have our coach. We didn't have half our team. We didn't know if we were going to be able to play the game. But it wasn't us boys. Don't build us up. It was Dr. Colvard and Coach McCarthy. Those two men had the backbone."

The plane carrying the players arrived in Nashville, where McCarthy and athletic director Wade Walker had flown into from Memphis. Reunited now, the MSU traveling party flew a commercial flight to East Lansing.

In a regional semifinal game on March 15, 1963 , Mississippi State played 24-2 Loyola, a squad with several black players.  Loyola won 61-51 and went on to win the national title.  When the Mississippi State squad returned home a postgame newspaper survey found that Mississippians were overwhelmingly in favor of letting the team play the game.

In the photo above Loyola captain Jerry Harkness (R) shakes hands with Mississippi State captain Joe Dan Gold (L).  Harkness and Gold later became friends and when Gold died in 2011, Harkness attended the funeral.  The photo above was placed next to his friend's casket.