"It feels normal," Hopson said a week after he'd addressed his team for the first time. "It feels just like I'm coaching at LSU, Florida, Marshall, Michigan, Southern Miss. It looks the same, it feels the same, you know what I'm saying?"
No, there is absolutely nothing abnormal about a white head coach coaching black players.
Unless, of course, you're the first white head football coach in school and conference history.
These days, there are a number of white faces on historically black college campuses. For example, Alcorn's tennis and golf coaches are white. Roughly 11 percent of Alcorn's student body is white. And in both the MEAC and SWAC football conferences, there are white assistant coaches and several white players at nearly every school.
But hiring a white head football coach for an HBCU is different.
"You could feel the emotional thickness in the room," Brown said. "There were alumni who said, very plainly, they personally felt that it was an insult to hire a white coach. They had been discriminated against in their coaching careers. They had been denied coaching jobs because of the black color of their skin, and there were people crying. It was an emotional time where everyone was having to face their internal demons. There was real wounding here. Something was being taken from them, that some core part of their identity was being taken out of them. And I heard this one student -- I won't say his name because he was really quiet -- he sat up in the back and he looked at the alum and said, 'I'm sorry. I understand how you feel, but the students are clear: We want the best coach, and we don't want race to be a factor.'
