University of Mississippi professor and author Charles K. Ross earned his bachelor’s degree from Stillman College, an historically black college in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, before completing his graduate studies at Ohio State.KANSAS CITY, Missouri -- Buck Buchanan, a mountain of a man, was at the top of his class in 1963.
The star defensive tackle from Grambling State was selected No. 1 overall in the American Football League draft that year by the Kansas City Chiefs. He became the first black player from any college — HBCU or predominantly white — to accomplish that feat.
Buchanan, 6-foot-7, 245 pounds at the time, captured the eye of progressive Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt and head coach Hank Stram during a time when selecting players from HBCUs that high in a draft was a foreign concept.
But this was the fledgling AFL — the new kid with new ideas on the new block that went toe-to-toe with the more traditional and staid NFL. The year 1963 was a bellwether time in U.S. history.
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated that year in Dallas. A volatile climate of national racial issues was on the frontburner — from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic March on Washington to the assassination of highly respected NAACP leader Medgar Evers to the four black girls killed in the horrific church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Civil rights marches, especially in the South, were as common as hit records from Motown.
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