Dr. Richard E. Holmes, who became the first Black student at Mississippi State University in 1965 and later returned to the campus as a physician, died Oct. 16, the university announced. He was 82. He enrolled as the university’s first Black student in 1965, then returned decades later to care for its students as a campus physician.
His death came less than two months after Mississippi State dedicated the Dr. Richard E. Holmes Plaza and a monument in his honor on Aug. 21.
“Richard Holmes was a man of courage, vision, and patience who enrolled at this university on July 19, 1965,” MSU President Mark E. Keenum said in a statement. Keenum added, “I will miss his company and his counsel.”
Born in Chicago and raised in Starkville, Holmes was 21 when he enrolled for summer classes at Mississippi State. He had spent two years taking pre-med courses at Wiley College, a historically Black college in Marshall, Texas, and planned to return there in the fall. Instead, he stayed.
His enrollment came three years after James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi set off a deadly riot. Holmes integrated Mississippi State without violence, but not without hardship. He later recalled that white students refused to sit with him in the library and cafeteria, leaving him isolated on campus. Local Black leaders urged him to stay, telling him another young Black man was weighing whether to enroll and would not do so if Holmes left.
He left full-time study in 1967 to teach school in Alabama and completed his bachelor’s degree in liberal arts in 1969 through night and correspondence courses. He earned a master’s degree in microbiology in 1973 and a medical degree from Michigan State University in 1977.
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Holmes spent more than two decades as an emergency room physician in Birmingham, Alabama. In 2003, he and his wife, Judie, moved to Columbus, Mississippi, and he joined the staff of Mississippi State’s Longest Student Health Center, treating students on the campus he had integrated 38 years earlier.
The university named the Holmes Cultural Diversity Center for him in 1991. In 2006, he became the first Black recipient of its National Alumnus of the Year award. He and Judie Holmes also established an endowed scholarship for minority students at the university.
