This week a college football team made history by threatening not to play a game.
Fifty-two years ago, a college basketball team made history by playing one.
The Civil Rights movement hasn’t ended. It has just changed sports, apparently.
Sunday, the University of Missouri football team vowed not to return to the field until university president Tim Wolfe was fired or resigned. Wolfe stepped down the next day. While it would be inaccurate to give all the credit for Wolfe’s resignation to the football team, there is no doubt the players’ stand was the tipping point.
It certainly was an illustration of the immense, mostly latent, power of big-time college athletes who not only are a powerful marketing tool for the university, but generate millions of dollars for the universities they represent. What we witnessed in Missouri is an example of that undeniable influence.
In 1963, we saw an example of that right here in our own backyard, when the Mississippi State basketball team defied an edict by Gov. Ross Barnett prohibiting Mississippi teams from competing against teams with black players. Barnett, whose shrill segregationist rhetoric would later incite a bloody riot at Ole Miss as James Meredith sought to become the first black to enroll at the university, is a man so reviled by history that his name still ordains the big reservoir near Jackson – The Ross Barnett Reservoir.
Instead of meekly accepting the status quo, Mississippi State’s basketball team, with the blessing and support of university president Dean Colvard, sneaked out of Starkville in the cover of darkness and traveled to East Lansing, Michigan, where the Bulldogs played Loyola, with its four black starters, in the 1963 NCAA Tournament. State lost a hard-fought game but won for Mississippi some measure of respect across the nation.
As far I can tell, however, this is the only instance where Mississippi State has found itself in the middle of any significant social issue.
Ole Miss and Jackson State played bloody roles in the Civil Rights movement, but student activism has never been much more than an afterthought in Starkville.
I thought, briefly, MSU students might rise to protest the decision of its president, Mark Keenum, who said a couple of weeks ago that while the university did not support the current state flag, which prominently features the Confederate battle flag, the university would continue to display the flag until it was removed by popular vote or an act of the Legislature.
Ole Miss and Southern Miss had already taken down the state flag. Given MSU’s unique history, it seemed certain that students from the state’s most racially-diverse campus might hold a different view and express it forcefully.
That didn’t happen.
But I wonder if the story would have had a different ending if Mississippi State’s athletes had been sufficiently insulted by the state flag to take a stand similar to that displayed by the University of Missouri this week.
Heck, I suspect that all it would take the alter Keenum’s opinion would be just one player standing up in protest.
If Dak Prescott, say, had stood up this week and said he wasn’t going to play in Saturday’s game against Alabama unless the state flag was removed from campus, I suspect it would have sent Keenum running to the flagpole.
Fortunately for Keenum, Prescott has exhibited no interest is using the bully pulpit his immense talents and popularity have provided him. And, this is not to say the Bulldog quarterback — or, for that matter, any of his teammates — is somehow remiss for not taking an activist role. They are, after all, there to play football.
Still, one wonders.
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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