integration. You might as well blame Space travel and color tv, both of which occurred about that time.
My point was that both MSU and Ole Miss have Black athletes now. In fact, I think both teams are predominantly Black and it does not seem to have changed our fate in any discernible way. The real turning point was the the limitation of scholarships which caused a growth of parity among Division One schools. The integration issues are a straw man variable for the most part. What has changed in large measure is that the HBCU programs like Grambling, Southern, Jackson St., etc. that used to send dozens of players to the NFL every year are now getting fewer and fewer blue chip guys. The impact of integration was to give Black athletes many, many more choices of schools that sought their services... ask Hugh Green and Marcus Dupree.
I think it is unnervingly important to recognize that the top Black and White athletes from Mississippi often choose to go elsewhere to school. In the early 1960's Black kids went to HBCU's and White kids went to OM or MSU. That is simply not the case any longer. Over the last two years, Alonzo Lawrence, Andre Wadley, Stevan Ridley, Jeramie Griffin, Chaz Ramsey all left the state. These guys were all four or five star kids and this has been going on for over a decade. Integration has little to do with it. We get local kids who are grade risks or who have some attachment to the institution and while it does not seem like a huge exodous, when the top two or three players in the state leave every year, across the depth cycle of five years, it mounts up.