A Sporting Gesture Puts New Ending on a Game That Racism Won in ’57

It was before the assassination of Medgar Evers, before people rioted over a black man attending the University of Mississippi. The civil rights movement was still young.

So, in the winter of 1957, Stanley Hill expected nothing more than a basketball game when he and his Iona College teammates traveled south to play the University of Mississippi.

How could he know the Ole Miss players--all white--would leave the court before tip-off, ordered back to the locker room because one of their opponents--Hill--was black.

How could he know a forfeit would be announced over the public address system, all eyes in the arena suddenly fixed on him.

“I was 20 years old,” he said. “It was humiliating.”

It was the first strong taste of prejudice for the New York City player. He went home and did his best to let the memory fade as he finished school and started a family. If anything, he used the anger to fuel his career as a union representative.

Now, four decades later, the story has another twist.

Last Sunday, it was announced that Iona and Ole Miss would finally meet, paired in the first round of the NCAA’s “March Madness” tournament. Then came a call that landed the 64-year-old man, bespectacled and gray, in Kemper Arena on Friday night, watching the game he never got to play, seated beside the governor of Mississippi.

“Incredible,” he said. “I didn’t think anyone would even remember what happened.”

*

Skin color never figured into the New York City game. Black or white, everyone played. It was the same when Hill enrolled at nearby Iona, located in New Rochelle, N.Y., where he was the only black player but never felt singled out.

“A Bronx boy,” said Ruby, his wife of 43 years and his sweetheart even longer. “I’m from North Carolina, but I couldn’t explain prejudice to him.”

The state of Mississippi, meanwhile, was still segregated and on its way to becoming a civil rights flash point. James Meredith would enroll at Ole Miss in 1962, triggering riots and police blockades. Evers would be shot in front of his Jackson, Miss., home the next year.

Maybe it was too soon for Hill to have expected something like the events of Jan. 2, 1957, the day Iona was supposed to meet Ole Miss in a holiday tournament in Owensboro, Ky.

As Iona made the rare trip to the South, Hill saw “Colored Only” signs over restrooms. The afternoon before the game against Ole Miss, he and his teammates wanted to kill time in a pool hall but were confronted by the owner.

“He told us flat out that he didn’t allow Negroes in his place,” Hill said.

Even basketball, his haven, was not immune. Hill realized as much when the Ole Miss players walked off the court.

According to various accounts and newspaper reports, former Mississippi Gov. James P. Coleman ordered the forfeit. Ole Miss players came by Hill’s hotel room that night to apologize.

The stricken young man called home.

“I could tell by the sound of his voice,” Ruby said. “He had never felt anything like that.”

It helped that his coach and teammates huddled with him late into the night and that Iona drew cheers in its game against Montana State the following day. The Gaels lost, but tournament organizers presented them with a sportsmanship award.

On the trip back, Hill made a promise to himself. He was a calm person, not the type to swing too high or low. “I understood how important it was to grow from there and not be bitter,” he said.

The experience helped point him toward the unions and workers’ rights. At home, Stanley and Ruby assembled a scrapbook, something they would later use to teach their two sons about tougher times.

Otherwise, the incident faded, a distant memory revived in an instant on Sunday, when the Iona-Ole Miss matchup flashed across the television screen in their Queens home.

“We both screamed,” Ruby said.

Hill said: “Then I called one of my old teammates, Bob McGuire, and we talked for an hour.”

To that point, it was as if the forfeit never existed for the people of Oxford, Miss. University files contained no record of it, no mention of the basketball team entering a holiday tournament that season.

Current administrators learned of the incident only after a New York newspaper published an article this week. The story sounded all too familiar to Chancellor Robert Khayat.

In 1959, Khayat, who is white, played catcher on an Ole Miss baseball team that won the Southeastern Conference but was forbidden from going to the NCAA regional because, once again, Gov. Coleman feared that other teams would include black players.

“I was outraged,” Khayat said. “It just seemed so ridiculous.”

Khayat grew up in a South where the schools and churches were segregated but, almost like New York, the ball fields were not. So Hill’s story struck home.

“Can you imagine a 20-year-old kid being told the other team won’t play because of the color of his skin?” Khayat asked. “That had to be tough, and we thought we ought to do something about it.”

Within hours, Ole Miss tracked down Hill and called with an offer to fly him to Kansas City to be with Khayat and Gov. Ronnie Musgrove. Hill was out, so Ruby relayed the invitation.

“Stop busting my chops,” he told her.

She said: “I’m not kidding.”

Arriving at Kemper Arena before a practice Thursday evening, Hill met with an Ole Miss team that looked different from the one he recalled. Most of the players are black, as is the coach. They gave him an autographed ball.

“This was something about our history,” Coach Rod Barnes said. “I wanted our kids to understand.”

The players wanted Hill to tell his story.

“I want to know what kind of experiences he went through,” senior guard Jason Holmes said. “Just to make me appreciate that now we don’t have to go through things like that.”

*

If this had been a movie, 14th-seeded Iona would have upset third-seeded Ole Miss. That did not happen. Mississippi won, 72-70.

But there is the hint of a grander victory. Though no one claims racial harmony in modern Mississippi, or elsewhere in the United States for that matter, there are signs of improvement.

Ole Miss’ athletic teams are still known by the nickname Rebels, but red-and-blue pompoms have all but replaced Confederate flags that fans used to wave at games. Khayat touts a growing minority presence on campus, and Barnes talks about the SEC tournament championship against Kentucky last week, a game that featured two black coaches and black officials on the floor.

“I noticed it, there’s no question,” said Barnes, a Mississippi native. “In 1957, there’s no way that could have happened.”

Hill, now retired, looked down on the court Friday night and saw black and white players on both benches.

“That’s the important thing,” he said. “The ‘50s were a dark time, but now I see tremendous change.”

There was also a small, personal victory. Invited to the game by the school that had snubbed him long ago, Hill felt reassured that his decision to rise above indignity, to turn anger into motivation, had been the right one.

“In a way,” he said, “this is a reward.”