JACKSON - At first blush, the decision of the Mississippi State University Alumni Association to name Dr. Richard Holmes the 2006 national alumnus of the year seemed to be just a case of the university honoring an accomplished, deserving graduate based on the content of his life and work.
But consider the travails of some of the other members of the dangerously exclusive club that Holmes dared to join in the 1960s in Mississippi.
At the University of Southern Mississippi, Clyde Kennard - in 1960 the first African-American student to apply for admission to the school - was apparently set up on false criminal charges and sent to the state prison at Parchman. Kennard died three years later after being released from jail.
The struggle to clear Kennard's name continues today. Significant strides toward that goal have been made in the Legislature during the current session.
At Ole Miss, the 1962 admission of that university's first black student - James Meredith - resulted in campus riots that saw two killed and dozens injured.
Four years later, Meredith was wounded in a shooting on Hwy. 51 just south of Hernando during a voter registration walk, but he survived.
Efforts to construct a tangible campus memorial to honor Meredith's breaking of the color barrier at Ole Miss have resulted in an ongoing controversy between the school's administration and protesters in both the arts and civil rights communities.
But on July 19, 1965, Richard Holmes - then 21 years old - enrolled as the first black student at Mississippi State University without incident. Holmes later recounted the skinny on his first day on the Starkville campus to a Clarion-Ledger reporter: "There were no catcalls, no racial slurs. It was quiet and serene. Nothing happened. There was just curiosity and disbelief."
Holmes was a 1963 graduate of Starkville's former segregated Henderson High, where he starred both as a student and a linebacker-guard on the football team. He completed his first two years of undergraduate study at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, before transferring to MSU in 1965.
It would be disingenuous to suggest that Holmes enrolled at State and lived happily ever after. There were struggles, there was isolation and there was uncertainty as he lived alone in a two-bed dormitory room in State's Evans Hall.
"They (white students) would yell things at me sometimes, but it would never be personal," Holmes said in a 2005 published interview. "I recognized where they were coming from. This institution had been segregated for 87 years," he said.
"But no one ever spit on me, no one hit me, no one pushed me, no one pulled a prank on me," Holmes said. "Some befriended me and treated me with dignity and respect. Many just ignored me."
Holmes earned his MSU undergraduate degree in 1969 and later his master's degree in microbiology and nutrition in 1973. After graduating medical school at Michigan State University in 1977, he became a successful emergency room doctor in Birmingham, Ala.
Holmes and his family moved back to Mississippi in 2003, settling in Columbus and the physician joined the staff of MSU's Longest Student Health Center.
All that's history. Now Holmes has broken another MSU barrier. But in truth, it really was just a case of the university honoring an accomplished, deserving graduate based on the content his life and work.
For MSU, for Mississippi and for Holmes, it was a redeeming act.
