Tonea Stewart

Tonea Stewart was born on February 3, 1947, in Greenwood, Mississippi, to Hattie Leonard and Thomas Harris, a plumber‑electrician and an educator respectively. After her parents divorced when she was four, she was raised alongside her sister Beverly Branson, a singer, in a household that prized both academic achievement and artistic expression. Originally intent on a medical career, Stewart earned a B.S. in speech and theater at Jackson State University after a transformative school play sparked her love for the stage. She pursued further theater studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and completed a Ph.D. in theater arts at Florida State University in 1989, cementing her dual identity as a scholar and performer. Her academic credentials would later underpin a distinguished teaching career spanning nearly five decades, during which she rose from high‑school instructor to professor, department chair, and eventually dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Alabama State University, retiring in 2019.

Stewart’s on‑screen debut arrived with the 1976 TV movie Nightmare in Badham County, and she quickly became a reliable character actress, appearing in seminal films such as Mississippi Burning (1988) and Body Snatchers (1993). She is perhaps best remembered for her recurring role as Aunt Etta Kibby on the television series In the Heat of the Night (1991‑1993) and for portraying Gwen Hailey, the wife of Samuel L. Jackson’s character, in A Time to Kill (1996), a performance that earned her an NAACP Image Award nomination. Her later work includes notable appearances in Girls Trip, Mississippi Damned, and the Oprah Winfrey Network’s First Christmas, as well as a poignant turn as the mother of Pentecostal bishop Carlton Pearson in Come Sunday (2018). Beyond acting, Stewart has contributed to education policy, being appointed in 2020 to represent Alabama’s fifth district on the State Board of Education, confirming her lasting impact on both the arts and academia.