Back in my sportswriting days, I once sat for an interview with Ben Jobe, the remarkable man who coached basketball all over the HBCU circuit, most notably at Southern University in Baton Rouge. In the mid-1950s, he enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville. Fisk was the red-hot center of the fight for racial equality almost from its opening. Among those who attended the school include W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and John Lewis. In the 1960s, under the leadership of the Rev. James Lawson, Fisk helped lead early sit-ins at restaurants and lunch counters to fight segregation.

Anyway, Jobe graduated and began coaching at a local high school. He told me that he'd watched cars full of locals whooping and hollering and waving Confederate battle flags on November 22, 1963, celebrating th

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