Dear President LaForge,

We are writing in response to recent conversations sparked by the release of the Academy Award® nominated short documentary “The Queen of Basketball” and Ms. Harris’ untimely passing¹ regarding the manner in which Ms. Harris is recognized on Delta State’s campus. In this letter, we will lay out the rationale for renaming the Coliseum on Delta State’s campus from the Walter Sillers Coliseum to the Lusia Harris Coliseum.

We are a group led by Ms. Harris’ children. Many of us have graduated from, worked at, and contributed to Delta State over the years. We greatly value the institution and its commitment to honor its distinguished alumni and welcome students of all backgrounds to the Delta. Furthermore, we particularly respect your leadership, President LaForge, in inaugurating the Winning the Race Conference and your pride in DSU’s station as Mississippi’s most diverse campus. We also very much appreciate your initiative to honor Ms. Harris with an honorary doctorate eight years ago. That said, we feel compelled to express our deep disappointment with the University’s failure to acknowledge Ms. Harris appropriately on campus for the past 45 years.

While we appreciate you offering consolation alternatives to renaming the Coliseum, we believe that Ms. Harris’ contributions to the University warrant only the highest position of honor.

We would much rather spend our time extolling Ms. Harris’ accomplishments; however, the University has expressed a number of times to the Harris Family that the reason Ms. Harris cannot be recognized as the namesake for the Coliseum is because the building’s current namesake, Walter Sillers Jr., must remain in place to protect the best interests of the University.

Therefore, in accordance with the University’s policy on naming², we must first explain why Walter Sillers Jr.’s reputation dishonors the University’s standards and is contrary to the best interests of the University.

As one of the longest serving state representatives in Mississippi history, there is no doubt that Walter Sillers was party to establishing and building up Delta State’s campus. He, in his first decade in the Mississippi Senate, was a staunch supporter of his father-in-law Senator W.B. Roberts’ successful initiative to establish a teachers’ college in the Delta. And as a proud citizen of Rosedale, Sillers must be given partial credit for helping sway the Committee on Universities and Colleges to build Delta State in Cleveland over Moorhead in that bitter 1924 contest. Sillers was also clearly involved in directing public funds to the University during his career.

We applaud you and the University for recognizing that “this campus stands as a testament to the successes of integration”. In conflict with that mission, Walter Sillers’ legacy, sadly, is a testament to the moral failures of segregation.

The record shows that Sillers was a lifelong white supremacist and chief architect of Mississippi’s segregation laws whose support of the University had a non-negotiable condition — that Delta State remained an all-white institution. This would avoid, as he often put it, “the mongrelization”³ of the white race that integration would bring. Indeed, it is indisputable that Sillers would never have fought to allocate a penny to “the most diverse campus in Mississippi.” Sillers wrote in 1947 that integration and social equality among the races would be “a condition more horrible to decent, red-blooded white southerners than death could possibly be.”⁴

Sillers was willing to do just about anything to keep Mississippi segregated. In 1953, Sillers advocated to “amend our constitution and abolish the public school system in this state, sell our school buildings, etc.” in order to avoid federally mandated integration, even if it would “seal the death knell of the public education of the negro in southern states.”⁵

Moreover, it is not far-fetched to see that Sillers himself would likely want his name removed from an integrated school building, seeing as he declined honorary degrees from Black schools, and even protested to Governor Coleman in 1957 that if LeRoy Percy State Park were converted into a “negro park” that LeRoy Percy (a fellow white senator) should be removed from the park’s name.⁶ Surely, Sillers would not be able to stomach the contradiction that Ms. Harris, a Black superstar on an integrated campus, one of the “ignorant irresponsible negros”⁷ who he worked to deny voting rights, was the greatest player ever to grace the Walter Sillers Coliseum.

Sillers’ prejudice was not only directed at education. In 1946, Sillers wrote Governor Thomas L. Bailey to urge him to take “action as may be necessary to keep the Democratic party in Mississippi a purely white man’s party, and prohibit participation therein by Negroes.”⁸ Earlier, in 1941, Sillers ardently defended a poll tax aimed at excluding Black voters, which, if abolished, he warned “throws down the bars and permits all of the ignorant irresponsible negros in this country to participate in elections.”⁹ In 1955, Sillers wrote that the White Citizen’s Council, the largest and most influential white supremacist organization in Mississippi, was “a very worthy organization with worthy objectives…organized to protect the white people from onslaughts by negroes and other races.”¹⁰

In other words, Walter Sillers Jr. was an open, ardent and proud racist, with odious attitudes even for his own time. During his time in power, Walter Sillers personally inflicted and perpetuated the still-felt lacerations of segregation for five decades, a legacy that you and countless others spend precious time and resources every day to painstakingly unpack, mitigate, and heal with initiatives like the Winning the Race Conference. Even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Sillers continued to find loopholes to effectively continue segregation and convince others of his views. We encourage you to read Mr. Sillers’ own letters from your University’s Archives and follow his struggle to take exceptional measures in marshalling tens of millions of dollars in public funds to carry out his bigoted vision.

Furthermore, in contrast to the idea that Sillers was a Delta State loyalist, Sillers actually opposed the financing of the very building in question. In October 1959, Sillers opposed the sale of bonds that financed the building of the Coliseum the following year, writing “I was very much disturbed over the issuance of sixteen and one-half million dollar Full Faith and Credit Bonds of the State for buildings at the universities and colleges. We tried to defeat this but there were too many in our camp who are so partisan to “Ole Miss,” Mississippi State, M.S.C.W., Mississippi Southern, and Delta State, those of us who opposed this bond issue could not persuade them it was not the sound thing to do. In addition, there was the argument that something must be done to bring the Negro Colleges up to a near par with the white colleges if we expect to keep our white colleges segregated.”¹¹

We’d also like to address the common defense that The Walter Sillers Fine Arts Complex which stands on Mississippi Valley State University’s campus is a proverbial insurance policy for Delta State. Namely, that Sillers couldn’t have been that racist because MSVU’s largely Black community has not yet pulled down his name. In other words: Why should we change it if the Black school still has his name up? It does not take much research to know that the MSVU building was named as political patronage to Sillers, and Sillers’ only interest in establishing MSVU in the first place was in order to keep Black students out of colleges like Delta State. Furthermore, simply because another college has not acted does not exculpate Delta State from failing to follow its own policies.

Symbols matter. And given what we know today, it would be irresponsible not to rectify the clear conflict between the University’s noble mission and current demographics and the symbols that mark its edifices.

In stark contrast, Ms. Harris’ name not only stands for excellence, bravery and the high-water mark of athletic achievement at DSU, but also her story, like Delta State itself, is “a testament to the successes of integration.” Indeed, it was only five years prior to Ms. Harris’ enrollment as a freshman that Shirley A. Washington was the first Black student to enroll at Delta State. From that adverse context, Ms. Harris rose up to be the first dominant female basketball player in college sports. Ms. Harris was not only the only Black player on the Lady Statesmen, who led the team to three consecutive national AIAW championships that included a 51-game winning streak, but she was also voted by the student body as Delta State’s first Black Homecoming Queen in 1976. After she graduated, Delta State would never reach those heights again. Additionally, Ms. Harris holds the unbreakable record of scoring the first (two) baskets as a woman in Olympic history, and the unique distinction of being the first and only woman officially drafted in the NBA.

When she passed in January, her story took the world by storm, appearing in every major newspaper and television network in the United States, once again putting Delta State University on the map in the most positive light. She is, without doubt, the most distinguished and historically significant athlete to ever graduate from Delta State, and likely Delta State’s most distinguished alumni period. As your eulogy of Ms. Harris stated, President LaForge, “She has always been part of the fabric and spirit of this University, and she leaves a legacy that will likely go unmatched forever.”

It’s worth noting, as Ms. Harris did in the short documentary “The Queen of Basketball,” that she almost went to Alcorn State University, but decided to come to Delta State instead because they were progressive enough to have a women’s basketball team. Indeed, where Delta State expands itself, it succeeds.

Despite the lack of formal recognition by the University for so many years, Ms. Harris loved Delta State. She earned two degrees there. She worked there as a guidance counselor and later as an assistant coach. She sent her daughter there. She gave her best years as one of the greatest basketball players of the 20th century to Delta State.

When Ms. Harris accepted her doctorate from you in 2014 she said, “I encourage the students of Delta State to continue to dream. Dreams come true if you work hard. I learned that at Delta State.”

President LaForge, the time has come for DSU to raise Ms. Harris up to her rightful place as a symbol of the success of diversity and the incredible heights possible for a child of the Delta.

Let the name Lusia Harris, not Walter Sillers, grace the name of Delta State’s Coliseum, which she made historic.

Let the Coliseum be named for a dominant Delta-born athletic talent and internationally revered American of whom the University can be forever proud.

Let the students of Delta State remember what is possible if only they continue to dream.

Signed,