Ole Miss Looks To Make Amends

The basketball teams for Iona and Mississippi, which will meet Friday for the first time, were supposed to play each other once before, on Jan. 2, 1957.

The game is even listed in the Iona record book as a 2-0 victory, the official score for a forfeit.

There's no sign of it in the Ole Miss book, which might be understandable.

Shortly before tipoff, Iona's players were told that the governor of Mississippi, J.P. Coleman, had refused to let the Rebels take the court against a school with a black player.

"It's been 44 years but you don't forget the impact that it had," said Stanley Hill, who was Iona's black player and went on to a long career as a New York City labor leader. "We went on the court and the next thing I knew, the coach for Mississippi had pulled his team. He found out the governor said, `We're not going to play any blacks - against any blacks or with any blacks.' It was a terrible thing to hear."

Hill, 64, is quick to add that the governor's sentiment was far from unanimous. The crowd - at the All-American City Invitational in Owensboro, Ky. - booed the Mississippi team as it walked off and cheered Iona when it played the next night. And the Mississippi coach and players were upset and embarrassed, Hill remembers.

"We went back to the hotel, angry, shocked," he said Tuesday. "And then came the Mississippi players, right to my room, to apologize."

Carlton Garner, 65, was a sophomore on the Ole Miss team of '57.

"That was the political climate then," said Garner, who lives in Gulf Shores, Ala.

Garner said he played against blacks growing up in Columbus, Ga., and didn't understand why it was a problem, but "we played for Ole Miss and that was part of Mississippi at that time. We didn't question it. We weren't in a position to question it."

When he learned of the Iona-Mississippi matchup, "I said to my wife 'This is great. This is a good thing.' "

Also Tuesday, Hill and his wife, Ruby, accepted an invitation from Mississippi Chancellor Robert Khayat to be a guest of Ole Miss at Friday's Iona-Mississippi game in Kansas City, Mo.

Robert McGuire, an Iona teammate who became New York City police commissioner, said he and Hill reminisced about the incident as soon as it was announced on Sunday that Iona, champion of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, would play Ole Miss, the 14th-ranked team in the nation, in the NCAA tournament.

"The memories came back very quickly," McGuire, now a consultant, said from his Manhattan office. "Then Stan and I talked about it, just talking about how vivid our memories were, how stark that issue was, how outraged we were and how far we've come as a societ.

"It happened in my lifetime, and look how things have changed," he said. "We're not where we need to be but I think this shows we've made dramatic change in the last 40 years in the field of race relations."

Hill, who was raised on Manhattan's Lower East Side, said he had certainly met with racism, "but this was a shocker because I'd never had an experience like that before in terms of playing ball. Sports had saved me many times, from the streets, from whatever, and we had seen such accomplishment in sports, with my hero Jackie Robinson and others. My teammates, we never thought about who was black and white."

He said he takes comfort in knowing that Mississippi's basketball team is now mostly black.

Langston Rogers, who has been sports information director at Mississippi for 20 years, said he has no reason to doubt the Iona players' accounts but was unaware of the forfeit and can find no reference to it in school records.

"That's why it hasn't been in our book, we didn't have knowledge of it," he said. "Having heard all this I feel confident it happened, and if it did, then next year our records will reflect it."

Mississippi's snub of Iona was not an isolated event. Another Mississippi school, Mississippi State, won automatic entry to the NCAA tournament in 1959, 1961 and 1962 but refused to play each time because it would meet black opponents.

McGuire said that before the 1957 game, "There was a suggestion" that if Gaels coach Jim McDermott kept Hill on the bench, Ole Miss would relent and play.

McDermott, now 90, says the suggestion angered him.

"I told them Iona College wasn't about to do that," he said.

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