Journal of Southern History

In sports terms, the matchup between Loyola University Chicago and Mississippi State University (MSU) in the 1963 National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) national championship men's basketball tournament was no different than the other seven games played during that round. The teams met at a neutral site, Loyola won, and MSU returned home disappointed but proud of their achievement. However, socially, this game marked a huge moment. MSU defied the Mississippi governor's wishes by competing in the tournament. Unwritten social norms and practices held in place by white supremacist leadership forbade Mississippi schools from participating in integrated athletic competitions. These rules had not been challenged in athletics after Brown v. Board of Education (1954), but MSU's basketball team was talented and wanted national competition, so they competed at the national tournament. In doing so, this all-white team challenged white supremacist practices within their home state.

With Full Court Press: Mississippi State University, the Press, and the Battle to Integrate College Basketball, Jason A. Peterson uses MSU basketball as a vehicle to explore the "closed society," meaning the white supremacist segregation that defined Mississippi life, from the mid-1950s through the late 1960s. Peterson focuses on MSU basketball because while scholars have explored media and politics in depth, few have analyzed Mississippi sports [End Page 1017] during this time when MSU basketball achieved national success as other teams had not. Peterson begins his narrative with the 1955 Junior Rose Bowl—which marked the first time a Mississippi school played an integrated opponent—and the subsequent proposals from state politicians to convert unwritten segregationist rules into law. The work ends with the 1963 MSU basketball team and the State College Board's decision to officially eliminate Mississippi's unwritten rules. This opened the possibility of integrating the state's athletic programs, though it took MSU until 1971 to actually field a black basketball player.

Peterson's primary argument is that media coverage surrounding MSU basketball and race relations was more about preserving the power and values of the "closed society" than simply reporting on sporting events. The 1962–1963 MSU basketball team's participation in the NCAA men's basketball tournament marked a critical turning point in how journalists approached the highly contested issue of integration. Up to this point in the narrative, this book could have been subtitled "How Mississippi Newspapers Helped Keep State College Basketball Segregated," but Peterson pushes his analysis forward chronologically and argues that most journalists who once wrote in support of "closed society" politics simply stopped discussing racial issues. Peterson explains that the "emergence of racial connotations in athletic endeavors … was ignored because it forced the 'closed society' to question its own superiority and unity" (p. 6). Hence, sportswriters were noticeably silent when pioneers broke down racial barriers throughout the South and rarely acknowledged an athlete's race in print.

Peterson does well to situate this work within literature on the civil rights movement, black sports media, and mid-twentieth-century sports history. The majority of Peterson's sources are black and white newspapers from both large cities and small towns across Mississippi. The only criticism, if there is any, is that Peterson almost exclusively discusses Mississippi, which leaves the reader wanting to know more about other southern states' experiences with similar issues. Peterson situates each sportswriter within Mississippi's broader social contexts and untangles each writer's political motivations, which were embedded in what seemed to be purely sporting content. Understanding the role of athletics in the civil rights movement is an important piece in the broader movement for racial justice in Mississippi. Full Court Press is certainly a must read for any Mississippian as well as for historians of sports and race.