SEMO Sesquicentennial Moments Dr. Joel Rhodes

On the eve of the bicentennial, KRCU crackled to life on March 5, 1976, an alternative music college station powered by student on-air personalities and 10 watts. Which meant that the station’s limited daily broadcast schedule carried from its tower on Academic Hall all the way to Capaha Park.

Just as two African American women – Roberta Slayton and Helen Carter – integrated Southeast Missouri’s student body in 1954, two black men broke the sports color barrier. These pioneering student athletes – Ronald Staten and Curtis Williams - became the first African Americans to play intercollegiate sports for our university.

Abe Stuber coached football, track, and basketball at Southeast between 1932 and 1946. During those years roaming the sidelines, courtsides, and meets, Stuber’s teams – usually known as the “College Indians” or “Teachers College Indians – won 17 MIAA titles in three sports.

Consistent with its professional teacher-training mission, in 1896 the Third District Normal School opened its first “practice” or “laboratory” school to give prospective educators hands-on classroom experience. What we today at Southeast showcase as experiential learning.

Formed in 1907, just two years after the completion of Academic Hall, the Southeast Marching Band is one of the oldest traditions on campus. Officially named the “Golden Eagles” in 1957 after a steamboat that traveled the Mississippi River, the band has marched to its own drumming across football fields, parade routes, and castle esplanades.

Following the May 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education – which ruled that racial segregation in education was inherently unequal – many America schools began integrating that fall while others stubbornly resisted for years. Southeast fell into the former category, enrolling Roberta Slayton and Helen Carter, our university’s first African American students.