Fifty Years Ago in Ole Miss

Interesting piece from Sports Illustrated's issue for November 13, 1961:

"I would give anything," wrote Jimmie Robertson, editor of the University of Mississippi's campus newspaper last week, "if there was some chance of Ole Miss and Michigan State playing each other in a bowl game. However, the archaic thinking which prevails in our capital city makes this impossible." Robertson's anger and frustration came from the weekly football ratings, which listed Michigan State as No. 1 in the nation and Ole Miss as No. 2. Robertson thinks that his team is the best, but no one will ever know -- Ole Miss refuses to meet any teams with Negro players. Thus, it cannot play Michigan State, Iowa or any school that does not engage in the same sort of hominy-grits thinking.

"That this sort of attitude still prevails in some southern centers of culture is hardly news. What is worth noting, however, is that student bodies of southern universities do not necessarily go along with the arteriosclerotic thinking of their faculty bosses. At the University of Texas recently, a campus-wide poll showed that the students were against such lily-white clauses 5 to 3. We somehow feel Jimmie Robertson is not alone at Ole Miss and that a poll there would show similar results. Meanwhile, let the panjandrums of Mississippi take their consolation from this one fact: only in a liberal, tolerant democracy could a school like Ole Miss be rated as high as No. 2 in anything."

Eleven years later, Ole Miss had its first African-American football player.