Margaret Wade

Delta State shut down women's basketball after 1932, arguing the sport was too strenuous for women, and some players burned their uniforms in protest. Margaret Wade, a team captain and twice most valuable player, spent the next forty-one years on other courts: semiprofessional ball with the Tupelo Red Wings, then coaching at Marietta, Belden and Cleveland High. She headed Delta State's women's physical education department from 1959 and revived the team in 1973, going 16 and 2 in the first season. A fifty-one-game winning streak followed.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Dockery Farms — 6.4 mi
  The plantation on the Sunflower River where Charley Patton lived and played from about 1900, now a working farm, a National Register district and a Mississippi Blues Trail stop.
• Mound Bayou — 9.2 mi
  The Bolivar County town founded in 1887 by men who had been enslaved at Davis Bend, built to be Black-owned, home of Taborian Hospital and a museum on Roosevelt Street.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 11 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
• Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary) — 16 mi
  The state penitentiary on Sunflower County cotton land, built in 1900 as a prison plantation, where Freedom Riders were held in 1961; a working prison with no visits and a Blues Trail marker at its gate.

More markers nearby

• Cleveland — steps away
• The Enlightenment of W.C. Handy — 0.3 mi
• Adath Israel Temple — 0.3 mi
• Chrisman Street — 0.5 mi