Contact: Phil Hearn
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Mississippi State's first African-American student said Tuesday his relatively uneventful admission to the university four decades ago represented a milestone in the state's emergence from a racially troubled past.
Dr. Richard Holmes, who now serves as a staff physician at the student health center, addressed a crowd of about 300 well-wishers gathered at the Colvard Union to help the university's Holmes Cultural Diversity Center mark the 40th anniversary of Holmes' admission on July 19, 1965.
As it happens, the student union building in which the ceremony was held is named for Dean W. Colvard, the university's president at the time of Holmes' entry.
"I did not intend to be a trailblazer, an outside agitator or an integrationist," the quiet-spoken 61-year-old Starkville native said. "But MSU, for the first time in its history, truly reflected the face of the nation."
Current President Charles Lee, retired former student affairs vice president Roy Ruby and other university officials and student leaders participated in the hour-long noon ceremony, which was followed by a reception in Holmes' honor. They listened as Holmes recounted events surrounding his historic entry to the formerly all-white institution, only one year after three civil rights workers were slain during Mississippi's "long hot summer" of 1964.
"Freedom isn't free-- you have to work for it," Lee said in his welcoming remarks. "For every freedom we have today, somebody paid a price. I'd like to encourage all of you to remember the past, but focus on our future."
Holmes said most of the approximately 7,000 students attending MSU during his two years of study here treated him with respect and courtesy, although some verbally pelted him with racial slurs. One of his professors refused to make eye contact with Holmes, he said, apparently hoping he would drop the class.
"But mostly, there were just silent stares of curiosity and disbelief," he said.
Holmes subsequently earned a bachelor's degree in liberal arts in 1969 and a master's degree in microbiology in 1973 from MSU. He finished medical school at Michigan State University in 1977.
After carving out a successful 23-year career as an emergency room physician in Birmingham, Ala., Holmes returned to his alma mater as a staff physician at the Longest Student Health Center in 2003.
Holmes said his love for Mississippi State began as a youngster while watching a university homecoming parade on the streets of Starkville in 1957.
"I knew someday I would be a Mississippi State Bulldog," he said.