Hiring a Black Head Coach in 2003 Is News? Yeah, Unfortunately

The Mississippi State Bulldogs football team has hired Sylvester Croom, running backs coach for the Green Bay Packers, to be their next football coach. He will succeed Jackie Sherrill in Starkville .

Croom was an All-American lineman at Alabama in the early 1970s. But his signing on with a traditional Southeastern Conference rival is not what is most noteworthy about this hiring. What is truly historic is that Croom is African American, and almost astoundingly, he will be the first black head coach in the history of the SEC.

This is historic. It is not, alas, surprising. The schools of the SEC were notoriously slow to integrate. Crises surrounding the enrolments of the first black students at Alabama in 1956, Georgia in 1961, Ole Miss in 1962 and ‘Bama again, in 1963, made national and international headlines. Autherine Lucy's ill-fated first attempt in Tuscaloosa, the riots in Oxford , and George Wallace's absurdist orchestration of his “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” brought dishonor on the region and on America .

Football, and sport in general, was not separate from this racist folderol. Indeed, during the Ole Miss crisis, football served as a sort of white supremacist anchor, mooring white supremacy with the values that too many white southerners held dear. Ole Miss, it was famously said, used to be known for three things: A rambunctious style of campus politics dominated by equally boisterous fraternities and sororities; Beauty Queens – Ole Miss used to redshirt Miss Americas; and football.

In this autumn of Eli Manning, football fans have often been reminded that the rise to prominence of this year's Rebels team (note the nickname!) hearkens back to the glory days of the 1960s. And glory days they were! Even before Archie Manning (Dad of Eli, Peyton, and Cooper to those of you of a certain age) rolled into campus and stole the hearts of the state (leaving as his legacy among other things a campus speed limit of 18 miles an hour, Manning's jersey number, natch) Ole Miss was a dominant team in college football. The teams of the late 1950s and 1960s contended for national championships. In fact, in an era when there was no consensus champion, Ole Miss ended a couple of years at the top of the national rankings of some pollsters. From 1959 to 1963, the Ole Miss regular season record was 42-2-3, they won three SEC championships, and the 1959 team, which went 9 and 1 scored 329 points while giving up but 21, was named AP's SEC Team of the Decade.

Ole Miss did this with a bunch of white boys. So too did Alabama and Louisiana State University, almost universally consensus top 5 programs in the years from 1957 to 1964, and every other SEC program, and not only in football. Even after the universities integrated, the athletic teams did not.

So it should come as no surprise that football provided one of the most dramatic backdrops to the Ole Miss integration crisis. Almost inevitably, events in September 1962 culminated in the Ole Miss-Kentucky game. In those days, major football games dwarfed all other news – the Jackson papers gave the Kentucky game the sort of coverage most newspapers might have given a third world war.

But perhaps there was a better analogy. At the game, played at Jackson's War Memorial Stadium (Ole Miss would play a game or two a year each in Jackson and Memphis so as to appease the alums from those cities who wouldn't or couldn't make the trek to Oxford), students waved Confederate flags. The band (dressed in their Confederate Greys) played “Dixie .” The students chanted the Hoddy Toddy, Ole Miss' beguiling, nonsensical football chant. But they also chanted “Ask us what we say? It's to hell with Bobby K!” and “Never will our mascot go from Colonel Reb to Old Black Joe.” Students sang the words of the “Never, No Never” song, which answered the unasked question, “When is Ole Miss going to integrate.” As one Ole Miss student who was at the game would later say, it was the closest thing he could imagine to a Nuremburg Rally in the United States .

It was into this environment that Ross Barnett stepped up to give a halftime speech. Barnett was otherwise a pretty nondescript Governor. But in an era of massive resistance, with Mississippi at the forefront, Barnett was quickly becoming an iconic figure. Before the more than 40,000 fans crammed into the stadium (to watch a rather dull game that Ole Miss won 14-0) Barnett intoned, “I love Mississippi ! I love her people – her customs! And I love and respect her heritage!” The crowd erupted in delirium. At this point, Barnett could have talked about the fixtures his bathroom and the crowd would have eaten it up. (This is not scant praise – just a year before Barnett had showed up at a football game and been booed as a result of the discovery that a bathroom in the Governor's mansion was furnished with gold accoutrements.) Students throughout the game had been roaring another popular chant from that autumn: “Ross is Rollin' Like Gibralter, he shall never, never falter.” (A future biography of Barnett would carry the title “Rollin' With Ross.”)

So what do events at Ole Miss in 1962 have to do with Sylvester Croom's hiring at rival Mississippi State in 2003? Well, Mississippi State was not exactly virtuous during the era of the Ole Miss crisis. Before the Ole Miss-MSU game in October 1962, posters supporting the Bulldogs popped up across the Starkville campus. Distributed by a Jackson advertising firm, the posters showed State's bulldog mascot nipping at the heels of Ole Miss' Colonel Reb. But Colonel Reb had one notable feature: He was black, caricatured to appear like a character from a minstrel show. Above the MSU mascot were the words “sic ‘em WHITE FOLKS.” The implication was clear. Mississippi State , in the minds of its supporters, was the white Mississippi school. Newly integrated Ole Miss was tarnished.

Fast forward to 2003. Mississippi State, like every school in the SEC, recruits black athletes ferociously. Race relations at SEC campuses are not great, but neither are they necessarily much worse than race relations on campuses across the country. Ole Miss still is beleaguered by its past, as its mascot, its nickname, and many of the traditions have fallen by the wayside, many, such as the waving of Confederate flag, in the past few years. Even Colonel Reb is under assault. For more than forty years after Ole Miss exploded in paroxysms of violence in 1962, the SEC has haltingly tried to rehabilitate its racial image. Now Mississippi State has taken a step too long delayed by hiring Sylvester Croom.

Fortunately, this is no affirmative action hiring. By all estimates, Croom's ascension to a head coaching job has been a given, and many are amazed that it has taken this long. MSU Athletic Director Larry Templeton said upon announcing Croom's hiring, "We went after the best football coach and we're confident we found that individual in Sylvester Croom." Many believe that it was only the nepotism so common in major college (and professional) sports that prevented Croom from getting the Alabama job that Mike Shula received.

Croom's hiring makes for an embarrassingly low total of five black head coaches in Division IA football. This is not enough. But for one brief and glorious moment we can look to the SEC and see that Mississippi State does not have any interest in being the white school. And far from being tarnished, at least this week, Mississippi State football shines.