Remember Henry Harris: Lost Icon of a Revolution: A Story of Hope and Self-Sacrifice in America

Description

It was 1968—after the freedom rides had ended, after the bus boycotts and sit-ins, the marches and protests, and long after the TV cameras and federal marshals had packed up and gone home. It was the spring Martin Luther King was murdered, only two weeks after speaking at a rally in Greene County. It was an extraordinary time, and Henry Harris decided to make his life matter by going to Auburn University—to become the first black athlete scholarship there or at any SEC school in the Deep South. He 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.

Author Sam Heys’s curiosity about Harris’s life peaked the night in 1974 when he ripped an article from a newswire printer and read four paragraphs reporting Harris’s suicide. The details were scarce, and the story was missing all the “whys.” Heys fills in the facts, answers the questions, and traces Harris’s incredible passage from living in an abandoned store in tiny Boligee, Alabama, to dying on a rooftop in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a journey that helped revolutionize the South and America.