Loyola-Miss. St. ’63 regional semifinal broke racial barriers
EDGEWATER, Md. — Sometimes, history has a way of sneaking up on you.
I was a 6-foot-8 inch center and a part-time player on Coach Forddy Anderson’s Michigan State University team in 1963. Our season was over, but most of us were looking forward to watching Bowling Green, Illinois, Chicago Loyola and Mississippi State in the NCAA Mideast Regional at MSU’s Jenison Fieldhouse in East Lansing.
The athletic department offered us the opportunity to sell programs at the games in exchange for free admittance. That’s how I got to see — on March 15, 1963 — what is now being called the “Game of Change.”
It was a semifinal game that night between Loyola and Mississippi State; Loyola started four African-American players. Mississippi State was all white.
But it was not until later that we learned that Mississippi State coach Babe McCarthy and other school administrators had snuck the team out of their state in the dead of night, defying orders from the Mississippi governor and state police, who were adamantly opposed to their team competing against black players in the north.
Over the years, I’ve been asked if I noticed that one team that night was nearly all black and the other was all white. Of course I did. But it’s worth remembering that blacks and whites had been playing together in high schools and colleges in Northern states for years. So as tipoff approached, we were most interested in seeing a really good basketball game.
Loyola beat Mississippi State 61-51 and beat Illinois the next night to advance to the Final Four at Louisville’s Freedom Hall, where they won the national championship.
With the passage of time, it’s now clear that the game at Jenison was indeed a historic milestone, a single event amid a decade of unprecedented social change.
As a college student in the 1960s, I saw headlines tell the story nearly every day: sit-ins, freedom riders, passage of the landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, violence in Birmingham and Montgomery, Ala.
It was as though the whole nation was waking up and finally trying to correct 100 years of racial injustice. To anybody in college at that time, it was a lot to process.
Growing up in Lansing in the 1950s, I was aware that Michigan State had great African-American athletes as far back as I could remember.
In football there had been black stars such as Don Coleman, LeRoy Bolden, Jimmy Ellis, John “Thunder” Lewis and Ellis Duckett. In basketball, there were standouts like Julius McCoy, Horace Walker and Johnny Green.
But at colleges and universities in the Deep South it was a different story. As late as the mid-1960s, many major universities, like Mississippi State, were still segregated.
Legendary Spartan football coach Duffy Daugherty recruited many of his finest players from the South, where they wouldn’t have had an opportunity to play in their home states because of segregation.
The late Bubba Smith, out of Beaumont, Texas, never could have played in the then-segregated state of Texas in the early 1960s, but became an All American at Michigan State.
Bubba was also an excellent basketball player, though he chose not to play at State. I played against Bubba many times in pick-up games and had the bruises to prove it.
In addition to being chosen by the NFL’s Baltimore Colts, where he became an All-Pro, Bubba was drafted in the seventh round of the NBA draft in 1967.
Looking back, that game at Jenison Fieldhouse was a small but important step along the road to equality, another reminder that sports competition will eventually break down even the very worst of racial barriers.
Mississippi State coach McCarthy has been gone for many years now. But I’ll venture to guess that if asked what motivated him to sneak his team out of Mississippi that night, he would say simply that he wanted his team to be able to play with the best. To hell with the color of the players.
Though we didn’t know it at the time, history proved him right. I’m glad I had a chance to see it happen.