Perhaps one of the biggest games in March Madness history wasn’t a finals matchup. It didn’t have a last second shot. Many young people today aren’t aware of what happened in the game. Yet as you’ll see in this column, it mattered for more than just the NCAA. And the lessons from that game, and the courage of both teams, a college president and a coach, could teach us something in this country today.

Mississippi State University had a great basketball team in 1963. They won several conference titles before that year, but you didn’t see many NCAA Tournament banners hanging from the rafters. That’s because state politicians did what they could to stop MSU from playing any team with a nonwhite player, as part of their mania about anti-integration. This is just two years after Freedom Riders were attacked, and a year before three Civil Rights workers were abducted and killed in Mississippi, the subject of the movie “Mississippi Burning.”

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia.  His views are his own.  He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu or on “X” at @johntures2.