The Walter Sillers Coliseum, a 3,000-seat brick area, has been the basketball mecca of Delta State College because it was inbuilt 1960. At the moment, Delta State, in the present day a public college with simply over 2,500 college students in Cleveland, Miss., was a white-only establishment.
Nevertheless it was a Black lady who made the coliseum well-known. In 1973, Lusia “Lucy” Harris performed her first recreation of faculty basketball as the one Black participant on her workforce. The coliseum was Ms. Harris’s dwelling courtroom when she led the Girl Statesmen to a few consecutive nationwide championships. It was the place she got here dwelling with a silver medal after turning into the primary feminine Olympian ever to attain a basket in 1976. It was the place she labored as an assistant coach when she turned down the N.B.A., which made historical past when the New Orleans Jazz drafted her (the primary and solely time a lady was formally drafted).
Regardless of all that, in case you traveled to Cleveland to go to the coliseum, you would possibly assume Lucy Harris by no means existed. You’d go a towering bronze statue of her coach, Margaret Wade, who was white and by no means received a nationwide championship with out Ms. Harris. You’d go a plaque within the foyer dedicating the constructing to Walter Sillers, who, because the longtime speaker of the Mississippi Home of Representatives, fought tooth and nail to maintain Black college students out of Delta State. And eventually, you’d arrive on the hardwood itself, which the college devoted in 2015 to Lloyd Clark, the white highschool coach it employed as head coach as a substitute of Ms. Harris.
The half-century omission of Lucy Harris’s legacy from Delta State’s campus and from the American consciousness at giant reveals that there has by no means been a scarcity of compelling feminine — and specifically Black feminine — athletic superstars. Their names simply weren’t etched in stone like so many males’s have been.
The coliseum was the place Ms. Harris discovered that Delta State had handed her over for that ladies’s head teaching job, breaking her coronary heart. And it’s the place she returned in a wheelchair after a long time in obscurity to movie scenes for “The Queen of Basketball,” the New York Instances Op-Doc I directed that was executive-produced by Shaquille O’Neal and Steph Curry.
And final yr, it was the place family and friends gathered round her coffin.
Regardless of having been one of many final public universities in Mississippi to combine, Delta State is now among the many most numerous universities within the state. And but solely considered one of Delta State’s greater than 60 buildings — the laundry constructing — is called for an African American particular person and nothing is called for Ms. Harris, the primary Black lady inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Corridor of Fame.
Maybe a Black lady was just too inconvenient and incongruous a hero to the white males who’ve led Delta State College for the final half-century.
Ms. Harris’s household has spent years lobbying the college to rename the coliseum in her honor. Once I discovered of their efforts, I despatched a letter to Invoice LaForge, the president of Delta State, imploring him to think about the request. It appeared like a simple win: Substitute the title of a racist politician with that of a towering hero who conjures up college students. He replied that he would mirror on it.
Ms. Harris died unexpectedly lower than a month later, in January 2022, prompting her household and me as soon as once more to induce the college to honor her legacy by renaming the coliseum. The president repeatedly supplied imprecise responses to our pleas, asking for endurance with out providing any timeline in return.
In March, it was Oscar evening. “The Queen of Basketball” was nominated for greatest documentary brief. Ms. Harris’s (notably tall) kids sat amid celebrities on the black-tie ceremony, they usually clasped palms and prayed that their mother would lastly be acknowledged and revered by Hollywood in a means she had not been by Delta State College.
Josh Brolin opened the crimson envelope. “The Queen of Basketball,” he learn. It was an unforgettable second. As I walked to the stage to just accept the award on the movie’s behalf, I heard Ms. Harris’s household shouting from the mezzanine, “Hallelujah!” I used to be proud to be a filmmaker that evening.
The next day, I supplied to mortgage the Oscar indefinitely for exhibition within the foyer of the coliseum — if the college would rename the constructing. Mr. LaForge declined to debate the matter any additional, citing inner naming procedures which are the province of the college. A month later, the college named a campus leisure space after a graduating senior who had been pupil authorities president.
In June, Mr. LaForge was abruptly compelled out of his place by the Mississippi Establishments of Greater Studying board, with out public clarification. (In a be aware to Delta State’s campus, Mr. LaForge mentioned that the board cited declining enrollment and monetary underperformance as main causes for his ousting.) He despatched Ms. Harris’s household an e mail studying: “I’ll share with you that it was my intention to position Lucy’s title on the coliseum, and I imagine that it needs to be performed. The very tough, tentative plans for doing so had a variety of shifting components, a few of which have been controversial. However, sadly, I’m not within the place to steer the cost as I had wished to do.”
Practically a yr after her loss of life, the household continues to be ready. My Oscar supply stands.
Within the Delta State College archives, the identical place we uncovered the bins of lengthy forgotten gameplay footage of Ms. Harris that made “The Queen of Basketball” potential, there’s a 1957 letter written to Governor J.P. Coleman relating to the matter of Mississippi’s oldest state park, named for LeRoy Percy, a white Mississippi senator. It had come to the author’s consideration that the park “is perhaps transformed right into a negro park.” The missive forewarned the governor of the widespread objection and forthcoming “formal protest” to that plan, urging him to dismiss the thought, or else heed the suggestion if the park have been to begin welcoming Black Mississippians: Take away Mr. Percy’s title from it. “With private regards,” the letter is signed, “Your buddy, Walter Sillers.”
Ben Proudfoot is the director of the New York Instances Op-Doc “The Queen of Basketball.”
Supply: NY Times
