Michigan State was very much a living—albeit isolated—laboratory. If Duffy Daugherty, the wealthy whites in the East Lansing community, and their middle-class and blue-collar counterparts didn’t love Michigan State athletics as much as they did, this integration experiment could have ended badly—or worse, not existed at all. In many ways, my dad was protected by a cover of whiteness at the highest level with John A. Hannah as the university’s president, reporting directly to President Kennedy and later President Johnson, throughout his college years.
