There’s a long-running joke in the South that no one in Mississippi knows anything about history because all of our history teachers are coaches.
I have a sense of humor—really, I do—but this sort of remark has always rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it’s because my dad was a coach and would ask me to read the newspaper to him as we drove on Saturday mornings to “swap films” with the opposing team’s coach (this was in the nineties and early aughts, before the age of Dropbox or Google Drive). Maybe it’s because two of my four high-school history teachers were coaches, and they were very good at their jobs.
Jay Blackledge, the son of a football coach himself, was the first person who ever told me the real story of Ross Barnett, the Mississippi governor who attempted to block the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi. Coach Blackledge liked to show videos on the SmartBoard, so he let Ross Barnett speak for himself.
“There is no case in history where the caucasian race has survived social integration. We will not drink from the cup of genocide,” he declared.
Coach Blackledge played the clip twice to make sure we didn’t miss it.
Sports have, after all, been pretty entwined in Mississippi’s journey to situate itself in history.
The same governor who equated integration with genocide once banned Mississippi State University’s men’s basketball team from playing Loyola University from Chicago, which had decided to start four of its Black players. Then-Bulldog head coach Babe McCarthy took his players anyway. The night before the riots on the campus of the state’s flagship university left two people dead in their wake, Ross Barnett gave a 16-word speech at halftime of the Kentucky game. Confederate flags fluttered behind him as he concluded that he “loved and respected (Mississippi’s) heritage.”
Many Mississippians would echo Barnett’s empty words about “heritage” when there was buzz about maybe, finally retiring that blasted Confederate emblem off the state flag in 2020, ignoring the fact that “the flying dixie” perhaps meant something beyond heritage to 38% of the state’s population. And once again, it was sports that at last helped turn the tide for the Magnolia State, with a super-majority of lawmakers voting to take down the flag after the NCAA and NASCAR threatened retaliatory action as long as the rebel flag still flew over state buildings.
We love sports here—just ask the 2021 Mississippi State baseball team, who took home a World Series trophy, and the University of Mississippi team, who did the same just one year later. We even think sports are so important that nobody raises an eyebrow at the fact that Lane Kiffin is the 10th-highest-paid college football coach in the country.
This week, the Mississippi Department of Education declared that the state U.S. History exam was no longer required for graduation. I think the state testing system is pretty broken and biased in the first place, so I won’t make a comment about whether that decision was right or wrong. I do think that folks who assume that Mississippians aren’t learning history just because a test goes away are wrong, though.
Perhaps they’d know why if they stepped into the classroom of a coach who teaches history before they go out to practice.
Correction: This article originally attributed the Loyola University that MSU played in 1963 to be from New Orleans, when the team was in fact from Chicago. We have updated the column to be accurate. Thank you.
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