Mississippi Escape!: The Team that Changed America - Paperback

by Malcolm Balfour (Author)

Midnight, March 12, 1963.
Mississippi State's president crouched low in the passenger seat, heading for the Alabama state line to escape from an injunction to keep the team home. In a second car, the athletic director and the basketball coach were fleeing for Tennessee. A team of decoys was heading to the airport the next morning.

All this for a little ol' ballgame?

There are those who call this "little ol' ballgame" the greatest victory for equality since Jackie Robinson joined the major leagues. Mississippi State's dramatic escape marked the end of the "Unwritten Law" and a profound change in what segregationists called "the Southern way of life." Right away, all major Southern universities began to actively recruit black athletes. This book is an eyewitness account of how a quiet-spoken university president defied the nation's most racist governor by engineering his team's escape from Mississippi to play in an integrated NCAA tournament, a move that would shatter segregation forever.