March 15, 1963
The Mississippi State University basketball team slipped out of town to play in the NCAA tournament against Loyola University.
Mississippi officials had refused to allow the team to play in any tournament that included integrated teams. After the team became a shoo-in for the 1963 tournament, MSU President Dean W. Colvard made a public statement that the team be allowed to play. In response, he received angry letters and phone calls, and extra security guarded his home.
“It was a tense period, and I needed some sleeping pills at night,” Colvard wrote in his journal. “I knew that we were in a fight and that we had to finish it.”
After a judge granted an injunction against the team, Colvard and other university officials scrambled to dodge service. Colvard and the coach left town, and sophomore players showed up first to fool those waiting.
Dubbed “The Game of Change,” it played a key role in the crumbling of segregation in Mississippi and the South. The Loyola team that defeated Mississippi State went on to win the national championship, and two years later, State welcomed its first Black student, Richard Holmes of Starkville.
“If some of our leaders were as liberal and generous in their attitudes as our students, they could do great things for the state,” he wrote. “This marks the beginning of a new era at Mississippi State University, an era that is past due but one that could release our people from their own prejudices and allow a degree of greatness to emerge.”
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