66-year-old Lusia Mae Harris wears the most animated expression, bubbly personality, and mischievous voice as she retells the story of her Mississippi high school classmates mocking her colossal six foot stature.

“They would tease me. ‘Long and tall and that’s all.’ That I was tall and I couldn’t do anything else.”

Suddenly, her doe eyes that were locked on the camera lens look away bashfully, and her voice drops nearly to a whisper.

“That wasn’t true.”

Lucy (her chosen nickname) was a humble and shy woman, so even when filmmaker Ben Proudfoot reached out to her directly to document her monumental career, she downplayed her own achievements.

“I had a few good years,” she told him.

“I said, ‘Lucy, you’re one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century.”

The few who know Lucy Harris call her the “The Queen of Basketball.” The rest have never even heard her name.

As the eleventh child of sharecroppers, little Lusia was already a pro at teamwork and routine. She’d go to school, come home to help pick the family’s quota of cotton, and wait for the other kids to flock to her front yard. The Harrises owned the neighborhood’s only basketball goal, and though it was a rickety thing, it’s where Lucy built her dreams. She’d even fall asleep at night with a blanket covering her head and a television tuned to Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain dominating the court.

When her high school classmates started teasing her, a basketball coach took notice and taught her the fundamentals. By the time she graduated, she’d led her school in Minter City—an unincorporated blip on the map—to the Mississippi state championship.

In 1973, five years after tiny Delta State University in rural Mississippi finally integrated, and just one year after President Nixon signed Title IX into law ensuring equal treatment of the sexes in programs receiving federal funds, Lucy became the only Black member of the Lady Statesmen basketball team.

It was the Lady Statesmens’ first year together too. In 1931, Delta State disbanded their team as basketball was “too rough for women.” Title IX brought the program back. In their second year, Lucy and the Lady Statesmen advanced all the way to the AIAW National Championship, equivalent to the NCAA which had not yet included women’s sports.

There was no way a tiny university in its second year of play with a rag-tag team of girls who barely knew each other could hold a candle to the three-time consecutive national champions they faced in the finals. But after a nail-biter of a game ending the first women’s tournament ever broadcast nationally by a major network, Lucy and the Lady Statesmen prevailed over the Immaculata Mighty Macs. Queen Lucy held court before millions, the same way she’d once watched the NBA greats.

Just like their former rivals, Delta State became the team to beat, taking home the national title every year from 1975-1977. But Lucy Harris was absolutely incomparable. Each year, she was awarded the title of MVP and by the time she graduated, Lucy held a laundry list of jaw-dropping stats. 2,981 points and 1,662 rebounds, with an average of 25.9 points and 14.5 rebounds per game.

For all you folks who don’t follow, Lebron James just set the record as the NBA’s all time highest scorer. His average is 27.2 points per game. Kobe Bryant’s was 25. Lucy was putting up superstar numbers. And scouts took notice.

The United States national team hadn’t won a Pan American Games since 1963. After recruiting Lucy as their go-to scorer, the US team went undefeated to win the 1975 gold medal, besting every opponent by an average of over 30 points per game.

The very next year, Lucy took yet another shot seen around the world, becoming the very first woman to score in a women’s Olympic basketball game. The team left Montreal in 1976 draped in silver medals. Lucy left with more than she could have imagined.

In 1977, with their 7th Draft pick, the New Orleans Jazz chose Olympic center #7, Lusia Mae Harris.

She was the first woman officially drafted to the NBA.

And she turned them down.

There were two reasons. Growing up in a big family, Lucy always wanted one of her own. A professional career came in direct conflict with settling down, and the secret she was carrying: Lucy couldn’t attend training camp pregnant with her first child, nor would she after Jazz officials had the nerve to suggest that they would own future draft rights to her unborn child.

But if she was being honest, “I didn’t think I was good enough,” Lucy told Ben Proudfoot.

In 4 years, Lucy Harris brought basketball’s highest honors to a college, a national team, and a country, ultimately becoming one of the first women inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame… but didn’t think she was good enough.

Even Shaquille O’Neal disagrees. “Her numbers were way better than my numbers,” he laughed. “She was so good that the people used to watch her games and not the men’s game.” It’s a stark contrast to today’s attitudes towards women’s basketball, and he wanted the world to know exactly who they’d been missing.

“Listen, I’ve seen a lot of great women basketball players, but the fact that I’ve never heard of this woman, I think it was a shame,” he said. That’s why he and Steph Curry signed on as executive producers of Ben Proudfoot’s documentary on “The Queen of Basketball.”

Between Lucy’s remarkable story, Ben Proudfoot’s mastery in capturing it, and the publicity that two NBA legends brought to the table, “The Queen of Basketball” won the 2022 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. Unfortunately, two months before she saw that added to her win column, Lucy Harris passed away.

“Better late than never,” her son Chris Stewart told the NBA. “Her story is like so many extraordinary Black women especially in America who end up trail blazing and doing amazing things. They effectively get written out of history unfortunately.”

Ben Proudfoot cosigned that wholeheartedly in an op-ed to the the New York Times.

“If you traveled to Cleveland to visit the coliseum, you might think Lucy Harris never existed,” he wrote. “You’d pass a towering bronze statue of her coach, Margaret Wade, who was white and never won a national championship without Ms. Harris. You’d pass a plaque in the lobby dedicating the building to Walter Sillers, who, as the longtime speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, fought tooth and nail to keep Black students out of Delta State. And finally, you’d arrive at the hardwood itself, which the university dedicated in 2015 to Lloyd Clark, the white high school coach it hired as head coach instead of Ms. Harris.”

That’s how Delta State has honored Lucy’s legacy, and Proudfoot hopes his documentary’s success is just one step toward one big change on campus. He “offered to loan the Oscar indefinitely for exhibition in the lobby of the coliseum — if the university would rename” it after Lusia Mae Harris.

A year later, Ben Proudfoot, Lucy’s family, and others like her former teammate and women’s basketball legend Pat Summitt who called barrier-breaking Lucy Harris “the first truly dominant player of modern women’s basketball,” are still waiting for Delta State to take Ben up on it.

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