Believing that segregation had ended in the middle of the 20th century, I couldn’t come to my senses Tuesday when I discovered that the Southeastern football conference had never had a black head football coach before.
My surprise was met by that of others who couldn’t explain how one of the premier NCAA conferences in the nation had failed to address this issue earlier. It’s not the fact that Mississippi State hired Sylvester Croom to be its 31st football coach that was news to me, but the idea that over a half century of qualified candidates for head-coaching positions were passed over because of their skin color.
I’m not old enough to remember the times of legal segregation or a time like Croom’s childhood where he dreamed to play on an Alabama football team that did not have any black athletes. But then again, it feels like I have been living in a secret world of segregation my whole life, a world that has me seeing countless of black coaches passed over for white coaches with less experience.
This was the case for Croom earlier this season when he was passed over for the head-coaching position at his alma mater, Alabama, for a less-experienced Mike Shula. Alabama, the SEC and the NCAA should have come under fire then for allowing black coaches to be continually passed over. But this trend is part of the SEC’s storied 71-year history. It’s the part that for some reason doesn’t make its website.
While the conference boasts that it may have built the greatest tradition of intercollegiate competition of any league since its 1933 inception, it fails to take responsibility for years of regrettable actions toward black athletes and coaches. The coaching “blackout” in the SEC coaching ranks was morally wrong for an institution that tries to instill values in America’s youth. The SEC recorded the largest total-attendance figure of any conference in the NCAA during 2002 with over six million spectators, but apparently all of them failed to realize that they had never seen a black head coach.
I’m at least glad to see that times are changing and that women and minorities are being afforded equal opportunities in athletics. Ten years ago, the conference instituted the Principles of Gender Equality, which forces each school to have two more women’s intercollegiate athletic programs than the number of men’s programs. I don’t see how this is equal, but what can you expect from a conference that waited nearly half a decade after the NCAA implemented women’s athletics before it participated.
In my mind, a NCAA conference has to be more than smoke and mirrors when it comes to the idea of equality. Just as schools were desegregated to allow all young adults an equal educational opportunity, I would have thought by now the head-coaching ranks of those schools would no longer be off-limits to anyone.
Mississippi is a state full of segregation, and Mississippi State is a school full of that same mentality. With the hiring of Croom, Mississippi State may have finally come full circle from the late 1950s, when its SEC championship basketball teams didn’t play in the NCAA tournament because it refused to play against integrated teams.
Croom broke through a color barrier this week not because he’s black but because he put in hard work and persistence. He was persistent in 1971, just a year after the first black athletes joined the Crimson Tide and was rewarded with a starting position on the 1973 National Championship team. For Croom, however, race has never really been the driving force in any of his decisions.
“When you line up in a three-point stance and hit another guy in the mouth, you forget what color he is real fast,” Croom said to ESPN.
Croom hasn’t been given the respect he deserves for much of his career. An assistant for five different NFL teams, he had been the running-backs coach for the Green Bay Packers over the last three seasons. It’s taken 17 seasons of football for Croom to return to the Deep South where his career began, but things have begun to change for a man who has been fighting for respect all his life.
“Things do change. And that’s what my dad always told me,” Croom explained to ESPN. “If you try to do things the right way and put your faith in God, they will change.”
Croom has so much history against him, so many opinions rooted in the past, but he’s definitely strong enough to handle it. Croom has been dealing with the southern way his entire life, and now he has the chance to once more set things straight.