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Article: News and Views; How College Basketball Paved the Way for Racial Integration at Mississippi State University
- Article from:
- The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
- Article date:
- July 1, 2004
CopyrightCopyright CH II Publishers, Inc. Summer 2004. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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In college sports, Jim Crow is long gone. The 2004 Mississippi State University men's basketball team won the Southeastern Conference championship and was seeded second in one of the four regional tournaments for the National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball championship. Nine of the 12 players on basketball athletic scholarships at Mississippi State are black.
Now go back more than 40 years to 1963, the last time the men's basketball team at Mississippi State University won the Southeastern Conference title. At that time there were no black players on the team and, for that matter, there were no black students enrolled at the university.
That year the all-white Mississippi State ...