REMEMBER HENRY HARRIS

This biography salutes a basketball phenomenon who integrated a bastion of racism.

Heys recaps the life of Henry Harris, the first Black athlete to play for a Deep South college in the Southeastern Conference when he started for the Auburn University Tigers basketball team in 1968. Hobbled by a knee injury that ended his dreams of NBA stardom, he killed himself in 1974. The writer—a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and author of The Winecoff Fire (1993)—makes Harris a potent symbol of the successes and shortcomings of the civil rights movement. Born to an impoverished family in harshly segregated Greene County, Alabama, Harris benefited from the quickening pace of desegregation in the ’60s, which prodded the previously all-White athletics programs at Auburn and the University of Alabama to offer him scholarships. But when he began playing at Auburn, Heys notes, Harris ran a gantlet of racial insults and threats at many of his games, struggled to find integrated accommodations on the road, and had to hide a relationship with a White girlfriend. More insidiously, even as his talent and fortitude made him a fan favorite, he felt a persistent loneliness and alienation on the overwhelmingly White campus—White teammates avoided rooming with him—and a sense of being disposable when his value to the Tigers waned. The author sets Harris’ experiences against a sweeping account of Jim Crow in Southern sports and the arduous struggles of Black athletes, who braved physical danger—one football player died when his White teammates suddenly piled up on him in a scrimmage—and ostracization. Heys’ narrative deftly untangles the complex evolution of racial politics in sports in the ’60s, while his lucid, sensitive prose lays bare the psychological pressures Harris faced and waxes lyrical about his quiet heroism. (“Harris was the tip of a spear heaved by his forebears…all the field hands who persevered in the South for decades, waiting for a chance to prove themselves…as if they had ushered him out of the cotton fields, a basketball in hand, to meet this appointed hour.”) The result is a gripping and poignant saga of an unfinished revolution.

A stirring account of the dubious battle waged against Jim Crow by an unsung pioneer.