MSU was led by head coach Duffy Daugherty, whose MSU teams played a large role in the integration of college football and sports altogether. Daugherty's rosters were fully integrated, which was unheard of in collegiate athletics at this point. There was an "unwritten quota" that consisted of only having five black players per team.

Tom Shanahan is a sportswriter and author of several works related to Daugherty's teams.

"It just kind of grew on its own. Duffy never really had a plan," Shanahan said. "Duffy did not recruit the south, the south recruited Duffy. He did it for all the right reasons, not just to win a football game."

MSU quickly became a hotspot for Black players to see the field and succeed. 

"Black high school coaches started calling Duffy. They saw Michigan State as a 'North Star,'" Shanahan said.

In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was fighting for racial equality in the United States. At the time, news media steered away from covering race, so the game was advertised as just another Big Ten school playing in the south.

This game also occurred in the same year that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

Many of the players on the Daugherty's teams couldn't have imagined the impact they would have on the landscape of collegiate athletics. College Football Hall of Fame member and former MSU halfback Clinton Jones was one of them. He was the first black player to score in Kenan Stadium.

"He didn’t even know it," Shanahan said. "These guys didn’t even know they were the first fully integrated team to play in the south."

MSU team went on to win two national championships with its 1965 and 1966 teams.