MLK’s speech on Feb. 11, 1965, before 4,000 people filling the MSU Auditorium. King said, “Time is neutral and the time is always right to do right.”
This was the difference between Duffy Daugherty’s 1960s teams that led college football integration. He didn’t wait for the right time to recruit college football’s first fully integrated rosters. This was unlike other coaches, most notably Alabama’s Bear Bryant, who coached segregated teams until 1971, and USC’s John McKay, who followed unwritten quotas of a half-dozen or so Black athletes until the late 1960s and 1970s.
USC and other schools began duplicating Daugherty’s example following the Spartans’ back-to-back national championships in 1965 and 1966.
