Remember Henry Harris

Author:  Sam Heys

It was 1968 and the year Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered—only two weeks after speaking at a rally in Harris’s home of Greene County, Alabama. In a tumultuous time, Harris decided to make his life matter by going to Auburn University. He was the first African American on athletic scholarship at Auburn and, more importantly, the first black athlete on scholarship at any SEC school in the Deep South—movie theaters, restaurants, and even swimming pools were desegregated before the South’s college ball teams. A high school valedictorian, Harris was the seeming quintessential candidate for integration, but nothing could have prepared him for the next four years. Fourteen years after Brown v. Board, he still had not sat in a classroom with a white person.

Publisher: Black Belt Books, September 2019
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-0578565781