Richard E. Holmes

Holmes completed his college degree and graduated from MSU. After service in the United States Army, he also earned a master's degree in related fields, and a medical degree, the latter at Michigan State University. Holmes practiced emergency department medicine in hospitals in Birmingham, Alabama. In 2003 he returned to MSU to become a staff physician at the university's health center. He has received considerable recognition related to the 40th anniversary of his landmark enrollment and graduation from the university.

Holmes was recruited to Mississippi State in 2003 by Dr. Robert Collins to serve on the John C. Longest Student Health Center as a staff physician.

Holmes enlisted in the US Army and served two years. Afterward, he completed a pre-med master's in microbiology and nutrition in 1973. He went North to medical school at Michigan State University, completing his M.D. in 1977. After that, he took several internships in Alabama and set up his residency in Ohio.

For the next two years, Holmes worked diligently toward a bachelor's degree in liberal arts. Needing an income, Holmes left full-time student status in 1967 to teach school nearby in Alabama. Continuing on part-time status with night and correspondence courses, he graduated with a B.A. in 1969.

By 1965, both liberals and segregationists in the Mississippi higher education community began to work toward integration. The Colvard administration was moderate for its time and place. In 1963, Dr. Colvard had been courageous enough to send his regional champion basketball team to the integrated NCAA championships, rejecting the desire by the white state political establishment to keep them out of the games because of racial issue. In 1965, Colvard, his staff, and the faculty were seeking a path to peaceful integration.

When Holmes graduated in 1963 from Starkville's black-only Henderson High School, Dr. Conner sent him to Wiley College. Holmes took pre-med courses during the two years he studied there. Wiley is a private, historically black college in Marshall, Texas; many of its students and faculty were active in the civil rights movement in Texas.

In 1960 Clyde Kennard had been imprisoned on false charges by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission and the administration of president William David McCain when trying to integrate the University of Southern Mississippi. White segregationists erupted into riots on the campus of the University of Mississippi in 1963 when a federal court ordered that James Meredith be admitted. Governor Ross Barnett had gained political points in the state for his refusal to concede, and President John F. Kennedy authorized National Guard troops to quell the rioting and protect Meredith.

Before Mrs. Hunter died in 1956 at the age of 86, she arranged for Holmes (then age 12) to live with Dr. Douglas Conner and his wife. He was a local Starkville physician, African-American community leader and civil rights activist. Conner became Holmes' godfather and life mentor, encouraging the youth to stay in school and study hard.

Richard E. Holmes (born February 17, 1944) is an American medical doctor who specialized in emergency department medicine. As a third-year college student, in 1965 he enrolled in the previously segregated Mississippi State University. He was one of five black Mississippians who pioneered the effort to desegregate the major state universities of Mississippi as part of the Civil Rights Movement. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, his enrollment was the most peaceful of these efforts to that point.

Richard E. Holmes was born in Chicago, Illinois to Horace and Minnie Holmes on February 17, 1944. He had three older brothers. When Richard was 18 months old, he and his brothers were taken to Mississippi by their mother when the parents separated. They settled in Starkville, Mississippi, with Eliza Hunter, a family friend Holmes would consider his "grandmother." Mrs. Hunter promoted education, hard work, honesty, and religion for the boys, teaching them that "being poor and black was no reason for failure."