Mississippi Today
Archie Manning and Langston Rogers team up to raise money for Delta State athletics
There was a time, in the early-to-mid 1960s when Archie Manning thought he would probably play football, basketball and/or baseball at Sunflower Junior College (now Mississippi Delta Community College). Or, Manning dreamed, if he really improved and put on some weight, he might even play at Delta State.
Those were the college teams Manning knew well. Those were the schools closest to his hometown of Drew. Those were the places his daddy and uncles took him to watch college teams play.
Ole Miss and Mississippi State? For a skinny, 155-pound, red-headed kid from the tiny town of Drew, those places were pipe dreams.
You know the rest of the story. Manning did add some muscle to his lanky frame. He did improve and went on to become one of Mississippi’s most beloved football players with Ole Miss and then in the NFL.
Manning never attended Delta State, but he never lost his admiration for the school and its rich athletic history. That’s why he will join his longtime friend (and Delta State graduate) Langston Rogers for fundraising conversation and sports auction at DSU’s Sillers Coliseum on Thursday night. The program, billed as “Night of Champions,” will begin at 7 p.m.
Rogers played baseball for DSU legend Boo Ferriss and later become the school’s sports information director before going to Ole Miss in the same capacity. That’s where Manning and Rogers became good friends.
โDelta State and Cleveland are 15 miles from Drew,โ Manning said. โThat’s where we went to the picture show after the one in Drew closed down. That’s where we went to eat after the two restaurants in Drew had closed for the day. I have great memories from growing up and going to Delta State games. My sister, Pam, went to Delta State. I practically grew up there.โ
Horace McCool, the longtime DSU football coach, recruited Manning when other colleges did not.
โNo big colleges knocking my doors down in recruiting,โ Manning said. โI was a skinny quarterback and I suffered a broken arm my junior football season and only played in three games.โ
There was a time when Maning thought he might play basketball in college. He was the leading scorer and best player on Drew teams that sometimes played preliminary games before Delta State varsity games at Sillers Coliseum, opened in 1960.
โOh man, that was a big deal for us back then,โ Manning said. โFor us, Sillers Coliseum, when it was brand new, was like Madison Square Garden.โ
Manning, a Major League prospect as a shortstop, played summer league baseball games at what is now Harvey Stadium at Boo Ferriss Field. Manning’s Babe Ruth League baseball team was coached by future Delta State football coach Don Skelton.
โEverybody in the Delta knew who Boo Ferriss was,โ Manning said. โHe spoke to my summer league team when I was 13. I remember it well not only because Coach Ferriss was so impressive, but because my daddy was so disappointed that it was my mother and not him who took me to practice that day. My daddy loved Boo Ferriss and so did I.โ
Manning was also a huge Mississippi State basketball fan back in the early and mid-60s when Babe McCarthy-coached Bulldogs teams were among the best in the nation and battled Kentucky almost annually for the Southeastern Conference championship. Manning remembers December of 1963 when McCarthy brought his Bulldogs to Sillers to play Delta State. Manning couldn’t wait to see his basketball hero, State’s Red Stroud, in person.
โRed Stroud’s hair wasn’t just red, it was flaming orange,โ Manning said. โI remember that and I remember he could ever more shoot the basketball.โ
Manning had told his father, Buddy Manning, he wanted to go to the big game. His father came home with one ticket. โHow am I supposed to get there?โ Archie asked.
โBetter start calling around,โ his mother answered. And he did.
Delta State’s financial woes have been well publicized in recent months. Academic programs have been cut. Budgets have been slashed.
Delta State athletic director Mike Kinnison, who played for Ferriss and later coached Delta State to a national baseball championship, is tasked with trying to keep Delta State nationally relevant in NCAA Division II with limited resources. Delta State has won national championships in football, baseball and women’s basketball and has been to the Final Four in men‘s basketball.
โWe’re staying optimistic and focused on increasing revenue to offset our budget cuts,โ Kinnison said. โIt will require utilizing every asset we have to maintain nationally competitive programs and positive experiences for our student athletes. …It is a challenge we will work through.โ
Money raised from Thursday night’s program dubbed โNight of Championsโ will help, Kinnison said. The program also includes a silent and live auction of sports memorabilia.
โWe are honored to have Archie and Langston engage our community,โ Kinnison said. โTheir long-time support of college athletics and student-athletes are evident and appreciated.โ
Click here for details of the “Night of Champions” auction.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
A Mississippi town moves a Confederate monument that became a shrouded eyesore
GRENADA (AP) โ A Mississippi town has taken down a Confederate monument that stood on the courthouse square since 1910 โ a figure that was tightly wrapped in tarps the past four years, symbolizing the community’s enduring division over how to commemorate the past.
Grenada’s first Black mayor in two decades seems determined to follow through on the city’s plans to relocate the monument to other public land. A concrete slab has already been poured behind a fire station about 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from the square.
But a new fight might be developing. A Republican lawmaker from another part of Mississippi wrote to Grenada officials saying she believes the city is violating a state law that restricts the relocation of war memorials or monuments.
The Grenada City Council voted to move the monument in 2020, weeks after police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. The vote seemed timely: Mississippi legislators had just retired the last state flag in the U.S. that prominently featured the Confederate battle emblem.
The tarps went up soon after the vote, shrouding the Confederate soldier and the pedestal he stood on. But even as people complained about the eyesore, the move was delayed by tight budgets, state bureaucracy or political foot-dragging. Explanations vary, depending on who’s asked.
A new mayor and city council took office in May, prepared to take action. On Sept. 11, with little advance notice, police blocked traffic and a work crew disassembled and removed the 20-foot (6.1-meter) stone structure.
“I’m glad to see it move to a different location,” said Robin Whitfield, an artist with a studio just off Grenada’s historic square. “This represents that something has changed.”
Still, Whitfield, who is white, said she wishes Grenada leaders had invited the community to engage in dialogue about the symbol, to bridge the gap between those who think moving it is erasing history and those who see it as a daily reminder of white supremacy. She was among the few people watching as a crane lifted parts of the monument onto a flatbed truck.
“No one ever talked about it, other than yelling on Facebook,” Whitfield said.
Mayor Charles Latham said the monument has been “quite a divisive figure” in the town of 12,300, where about 57% of residents are Black and 40% are white.
“I understand people had family and stuff to fight and die in that war, and they should be proud of their family,” Latham said. “But you’ve got to understand that there were those who were oppressed by this, by the Confederate flag on there. There’s been a lot of hate and violence perpetrated against people of color, under the color of that flag.”
The city received permission from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History to move the Confederate monument, as required. But Rep. Stacey Hobgood-Wilkes of Picayune said the fire station site is inappropriate.
“We are prepared to pursue such avenues that may be necessary to ensure that the statue is relocated to a more suitable and appropriate location,” she wrote, suggesting a Confederate cemetery closer to the courthouse square as an alternative. She said the Ladies Cemetery Association is willing to deed a parcel to the city to make it happen.
The Confederate monument in Grenada is one of hundreds in the South, most of which were dedicated during the early 20th century when groups such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy sought to shape the historical narrative by valorizing the Lost Cause mythology of the Civil War.
The monuments, many of them outside courthouses, came under fresh scrutiny after an avowed white supremacist who had posed with Confederate flags in photos posted online killed nine Black people inside the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
Grenada’s monument includes images of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and a Confederate battle flag. It was engraved with praise for “the noble men who marched neath the flag of the Stars and Bars” and “the noble women of the South,” who “gave their loved ones to our country to conquer or to die for truth and right.”
A half-century after it was dedicated, the monument’s symbolism figured in a voting rights march. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders held a mass rally in downtown Grenada in June 1966, Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference scrambled up the pedestal and planted a U.S. flag above the image of Davis.
The cemetery is a spot Latham himself had previously advocated as a new site for the monument, but he said it’s too late to change now, after the city already budgeted $60,000 for the move.
“So, who’s going to pay the city back for the $30,000 we’ve already expended to relocate this?” he said. “You should’ve showed up a year and a half ago, two years ago, before the city gets to this point.”
A few other Confederate monuments in Mississippi have been relocated. In July 2020, a Confederate soldier statue was moved from a prominent spot at the University of Mississippi to a Civil War cemetery in a secluded part of the Oxford campus. In May 2021, a Confederate monument featuring three soldiers was moved from outside the Lowndes County Courthouse in Columbus to another cemetery with Confederate soldiers.
Lori Chavis, a Grenada City Council member, said that since the monument was covered by tarps, “it’s caused nothing but more divide in our city.”
She said she supports relocating the monument but worries about a lawsuit. She acknowledged that people probably didn’t know until recently exactly where it would reappear.
“It’s tucked back in the woods, and it’s not visible from even pulling behind the fire station,” Chavis said. “And I think that’s what got some of the citizens upset.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Crooked Letter Sports Podcast
Podcast: New Orleans sports columnist and author Jeff Duncan joins the podcast to talk about his new Steve Gleason book and the new-look New Orleans Saints.
Jeff Duncan went from the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson on Saturday to Jerry World in Dallas on Sunday where he watched and wrote about the Saints’ total dismantling of the Dallas Cowboys. We talk about both events and also about what happened in high school and college football last weekend and what’s coming up this weekend.
Stream all episodes here.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
On this day in 1899
Sept. 18, 1899
Scott Joplin, known as โthe King of Ragtime,โ copyrighted the โMaple Leaf Rag,โ which became the first song to sell more than 1 million copies of sheet music. The popularity launched a sensation surrounding ragtime, which has been called America’s โfirst classical music.โย
Born near Texarkana, Texas, Joplin grew up in a musical family. He worked on the railroad with other family members until he was able to earn money as a musician, traveling across the South. He wound up playing at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, where he met fellow musician Otis Saunders, who encouraged him to write down the songs he had been making up to entertain audiences. In all, Joplin wrote dozens of ragtime songs.
After some success, he moved to New York City, hoping he could make a living while stretching the boundaries of music. He wrote a ragtime ballet and two operas, but success in these new forms eluded him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in New York City in 1917.
More than six decades later, his music was rediscovered, initially by Joshua Rifkin, who recorded Joplin’s songs on a record, and then Gunther Schuller of the New England Conservatory, who performed four of the ragtime songs in concert: โMy faculty, many of whom had never even heard of Joplin, were saying things like, โMy gosh, he writes melodies like Schubert!’โ
Joplin’s music won over even more admirers through the 1973 movie, โThe Sting,โ which won an Oscar for the music. His song, โThe Entertainer,โ reached No. 3 on Billboard and was ranked No. 10 among โSongs of the Centuryโ list by the Recording Industry Association of America. His opera โTreemonishaโ was produced to wide acclaim, and he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his special contribution to American music.ย
โThe ragtime craze, the faddish thing, will obviously die down, but Joplin will have his position secure in American music history,โ Rifkin said. โHe is a treasurable composer.โ
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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