 Screenshot by Julian Spivey
Lusia “Lucy” Harris, a legendary figure in women’s basketball, died on Tuesday, January 18 in her native Mississippi at 66. A cause of death hasn’t been released. Harris is known as “The Queen of Basketball.” She led Delta State University, out of Cleveland, Miss., to three consecutive women’s college basketball national championships from 1975-77 as a 6-foot-3 center averaging 25.9 point per game, 14.5 rebounds per game and shooting 63.3 percent from the field. Harris was a first-timer at a lot of major women’s basketball moments. She was on the inaugural United States women’s basketball Summer Olympic team at the 1976 Montreal games, where she teamed with other legendary figures of women’s basketball like Nancy Lieberman, Ann Meyers and Pat Summitt (playing under her maiden name Patricia Head). Harris became the first woman to ever score a point in women’s basketball competition at the Olympics. She averaged 15.2 points per game and 7 rebounds per game leading Team USA to a silver medal at those games. Another first came for Harris in 1977 when she became the first and thus far the only woman to ever be drafted in the NBA Draft when the New Orleans Jazz selected her in the seventh round. According to the Associated Press, she didn’t end up trying out for the Jazz roster because she was pregnant at the time. Yet another first came for Harris in 1993 when she became the first African-American woman’s player to be enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. In 1999, she would be inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame as part of that hall’s inaugural class. Harris is clearly one of the all-time greatest players in the history of women’s basketball and arguably the greatest graduate of Delta State University. I don’t think there’s any argument to be made that she’s the greatest athlete to ever come out of Delta State. She’s the kind of athlete whose name should be in big bold letters on the Delta State basketball arena where the Statesmen and Lady Statesmen play basketball games. However, it’s not. Whose name is on the Delta State basketball arena? Walter Sillers Jr.’s name. Who is Sillers? Well, he’s only “one of the most racist political leaders in Mississippi’s history” according to James W. Loewen’s 1999 book Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites and Monuments Get Wrong. According to Loewen’s book, Sillers, whose father was a member of the Red Shirts (similar to the Ku Klux Klan) and used armed intimidation against African-Americans during the Reconstruction era, was elected to the Mississippi House in 1916 and became Mississippi Speaker of the House in 1944. Throughout his more than two decade tenure as Mississippi Speaker he came to be known as “Old Guard” or “Grand Old Gibraltar” for his defense of white racial privilege, according to Mississippi History Now. According to the website, Sillers was resentful over President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party’s revocation of the two-third rule, “which for nearly a century gave the White South veto over party nominees.” He was also furious by the 1944 Smith v. Allwright U. S. Supreme Court ruling “banning the all-white political primary, one of the key tools propping up White supremacist power.” Sillers was also against integration, among other things you can read on the state’s website. In 1961, five years before Sillers death, Delta State University dedicated its coliseum as the Walter Sillers Coliseum, which probably wasn’t unusual for a university in the deep south during the era of the civil rights movement. However, for the university to continue to have the name on its coliseum more than 60 years later is simply head-scratching. They continue to uphold the name of a bigot when they had one of the greatest players of all-time play in that very coliseum. The name of Walter Sillers Jr. should’ve been stripped off of that building many years ago. Lusia Harris Coliseum would be much more fitting. However, Mississippi always seems to be one of the last states in our country to change from what is wrong to what is right. Hopefully that day will come soon. It’s just a shame Harris died before getting the chance to see it happen. If you would like to help the cause Delta State University President Bill LaForge can be reached by phone at (662) 846-4000 or by email at [email protected] The athletic director at Delta State University Mike Kinnison can be reached by phone at (662) 846-4300 or by email at [email protected] To learn more about Lusia Harris you can check out the recent The New York Times documentary “The Queen of Basketball” right HERE.
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