Delta State University has announced funeral arrangements for Lusia “Lucy” Harris Stewart, the basketball legend who led the university to three consecutive national championships and became the first Black woman inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
A funeral service will be held on Saturday, Feb. 5 at 11 a.m. in the Walter Sillers Coliseum at Delta State University. Visitation will be held the day prior from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Bethesda Five Points Center in Greenwood.
Harris, a native of Minter City, Miss., was the only Black woman on Delta State’s Lady Statesmen when she led the team to its first national title in 1975. A year later, the 6-foot-3 center scored the first basket in Olympic womens’ basketball history at the Montreal Games.
“Now that’s a record that’ll never be broken,” Harris said in “The Queen of Basketball,” a 2021 documentary about her life.
There was no WNBA league when Harris graduated from Delta State in 1977, so she married her high school sweetheart, George Stewart. She turned down an offer to play with the New Orleans Jazz and took a job coaching basketball at Amanda Elzy High School in Greenwood, where she had learned to play the game.
“Lucy was truly the first superstar of the women’s game,” Langston Rogers, the Delta State sports information director in the 1970s, told Mississippi Today’s Rick Cleveland. “She just dominated. Nobody could dominate a game like Lucy could.”
Harris passed away at age 66 on Wednesday, Jan. 18, in a therapy facility in Mound Bayou.
READ MORE: Why did an NBA team draft Lucy Harris? A Mississippi guy was involved.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Look for the "Republish This Story" button underneath each story. To republish online, simply click the button, copy the html code and paste into your Content Management System (CMS).
- Editorial cartoons and photo essays are not included under the Creative Commons license and therefore do not have the "Republish This Story" button option. To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.
- You have to credit Mississippi Today. We prefer “Author Name, Mississippi Today” in the byline. If you’re not able to add the byline, please include a line at the top of the story that reads: “This story was originally published by Mississippi Today” and include our website, mississippitoday.org.
- You can’t edit our stories, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style.
- You cannot republish our editorial cartoons, photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission (contact our managing editor Kayleigh Skinner for more information). To learn more about our cartoon syndication services, click here.
- Our stories may appear on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories.
- You can’t sell or syndicate our stories.
- You can only publish select stories individually — not as a collection.
- Any web site our stories appear on must include a contact for your organization.
- If you share our stories on social media, please tag us in your posts using @MSTODAYnews on Facebook and @MSTODAYnews on Twitter.