Joe Harris remembered the colors the most — the beautifully mesmerizing colors that speckled the Raleigh road as he sat in the backseat of a car rolling into the heart of the North Carolina capital. It was a July day in 1966, and Harris, 13 years old, looked out the window at a mass of people gathering on both sides of the street.
Advertisement
“I was riding down the street, and I saw these people with all of these different-color outfits on: blue and red, green, purple, pink,” Harris said. “Just so many beautiful colors.”
Harris was from a neighborhood in Fayetteville, N.C., about 60 miles south. When Harris was growing up, his mother was protective of her son. She warned him about going downtown and reminded him often of the places he should — and, more importantly, should not — go. She told him not to stay out too late. Harris never really thought too much of her protective ways. It was just how things were.
“I was just a young kid growing up in this world,” said Harris, now 66.
When a group of college students from N.C. State began a Head Start program in his neighborhood, Harris knew he was getting opportunities to learn and grow in ways that he didn’t think were possible for him before. But what he didn’t know was how this program would put him in Raleigh on a hot summer day — a day that changed him and shaped him in ways he couldn’t foresee.
That day, the group of college students who had taken a liking to Harris dropped by his home to take him to Raleigh. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was going to make a speech at Reynolds Coliseum on N.C. State’s campus, and they wanted Harris to join them.
So, Harris sat in the back seat as the group made its way up to the state capital, eager to see King speak for the first time, people in those colorful outfits slowly passing beside the car. For some among the gathering throng, it was a day of celebration. For others, the day and the visitors were unwelcome.
For Harris, in an instant, a colorful celebration yielded to confusion and fear as a group approached the students’ car.
“The people were lined up down the street, and some of them would come over to the car, and they started kicking the car saying, ‘Hey! There goes one of them right there!’ ” Harris said.
Advertisement
He remembers being confused by the hateful outburst. What is this? What is going on?
“I didn’t really know much of anything about racism and different ideals of people,” he said.
The college students, his caretakers for the day, offered assurances that he was safe with them.
“Don’t worry. They won’t bother you. You are with us,” Harris recalled them saying as they parked the car and got out.
Harris followed as the group made its way toward a mass of people. What he didn’t know — and at that point in his young life, didn’t understand — was that the Ku Klux Klan was protesting King’s speech. He walked right up to a Klan rally. The Durham Herald-Sun reported that about 1,500 people gathered at Memorial Auditorium earlier that day before robed marchers converged on Nash Square, where Harris stood watching.
As the rally took form, Harris gravitated to a black man standing off to the side of the group. Harris didn’t know who he was — didn’t know his name or where he came from — but remembers that the man wore a Navy uniform.
“Then, they noticed us,” Harris said of the protesting Klan members who gathered before his eyes.
The group started pointing, talking, saying things like “We’re going to get that little one right there” and “We are going to lynch him up!”
Frightened, Harris looked to the man standing near him — the one who had the same color skin as Harris did.
“The Navy guy who was standing with me, he looked at me, and I looked at him,” Harris said. “I said to him, ‘Hey, I’m getting ready to run.’ But he looked at me, and he says, ‘I’m not running.’ ”
Fleeing was the only choice, Harris figured. He took off, sprinting toward a bank across the street. Behind the bank sat a cop car. The officer inside yelled out to Harris, “What are you running from, young man?”
Harris responded: “I’ll show you. Just look behind me.”
Advertisement
By that time, the rally had overflowed the park, with some people being chased and others marching down the street. Harris said the police broke up the Klan rally, and he was able to see King speak that day. And it was what the civil-rights leader said in that frightening aftermath that impressed the 13-year-old Harris and has stuck with the man he has become.
“I heard him say, ‘You can be the first at something in your lifetime. You can be the best at whatever you do in your life. What you need to do is to pick something that you can be first at, something that you love,’ ” Harris recalled King saying that day. “I got that lesson, and it’s always stuck in my mind.”
From that moment, Harris wanted to be the first, and he wanted to be the best. He wanted to do what King called him to do that day. And for Harris, the way to do that was through football. But as he grew up, as he made his way to Georgia Tech, King’s lesson — one of many from that day in Raleigh — stuck with Harris. And it likely will forevermore.
A few years later, Harris had transformed himself into the top linebacker in North Carolina. He was highly recruited — by North Carolina, Wake Forest, Tennessee, Duke, N.C. State and Michigan State.
Not every visit and every conversation with recruiters were positive. At Wake Forest, Harris recalled people on campus getting the recruits drunk on their visits. He remembers sitting in the back of a car with his head spinning. A recruiter from N.C. State, Harris recalls, told him, “We have Negros on our team,” as if to degrade what Harris could offer. While Harris said he didn’t fully understand at the time what the man was calling him, he didn’t like it and didn’t want to play there.
Then he met Georgia Tech head coach Bud Carson, who said — and did — everything the right way to attract Harris.
“’If you come to my school, I will make sure you graduate,'” Harris recalled Carson saying to him. “‘We will take care of you until you graduate. You can do it.’”
In a twist, Harris never got to play for Carson, who was dismissed after the 1971 season. That was Harris’ freshman year, but because the NCAA didn’t make freshmen eligible to play in varsity games until 1972, Harris was unable to take the field under Carson. But Carson’s pledge to Harris was upheld by the Institute itself.
Advertisement
Carson’s pitch was a strong one, and it spoke directly to Harris. But it was King’s speech from several years earlier that fed his aspirations at Georgia Tech.
Harris wanted to be the first and the best, and at the school, he could notch a few firsts and work toward being the best. Already, quarterback Eddie McAshan and running back Greg Horne were on the team, the first two black football players to receive scholarships from Georgia Tech. But Georgia Tech didn’t have a black defensive player, and it had never had a black captain. Harris became the first. And being the best was well on its way, a status he achieved in 1972-74 as Georgia Tech’s biggest defensive threat.
By the end of his career at Georgia Tech, Harris had accumulated 415 tackles. Even now, more than 40 years later, Harris ranks in the top 10 in career tackles in the Georgia Tech record books. Harris’ single-season tackle record — 188 in 1974 — is still the number to beat. Following McAshan two years earlier, Harris became the second black player from Georgia Tech to be picked in the NFL draft. In 1975, Harris was an eighth-round pick by the Chicago Bears, and he played in 83 NFL games in six seasons before retiring from football. In 2000, he was inducted into the Georgia Tech Sports Hall of Fame.
At Georgia Tech, Harris manifested his goals as the first and the best. But that never meant things were easy.
Harris remembers professors who would explain that they didn’t consider him a person in their class because of the color of his skin; they regarded him as just a number. When Harris and black teammate Rudy Allen walked to class, some fellow students crossed to the other side of the street to avoid them.
It was hard, Harris said, but he tried to see it as a challenge to overcome. In those moments, he wasn’t thinking about the doors he was opening for black men and women at Georgia Tech and across the deep South. He wasn’t thinking about the future he was helping shape. He just thought about making a better life for himself.
“You didn’t really see the big picture of it all because it was your goal to be the best player you could be, to be the best student you could be,” Harris said. “You were just working toward that. You kind of had tunnel vision of just trying to be the best you could be. You didn’t really know how big this thing is because you are just a person. You are just being who you are and things happen. Success comes.”
Advertisement
Harris said he was taught early on at Georgia Tech how to meditate. This meant learning how to focus and how to put his goals together. When a new goal popped into his head, he would write it down on his mirror. Every time he brushed his teeth, every time he combed his hair, the goals he had set for himself would be there, looking back at him. And as he meditated on them, they would become realities that helped him navigate the challenges of his time.
“I would meditate three days — Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,” Harris said. “After that? Forget about it. Then, in the games, it would happen because your subconscious mind would click on it. It’s like you had the power to make these goals happen.”
Harris still meditates every day. He takes the time to be still, to think about where he came from and to ultimately leave that in the past. Every day, he works to show gratitude and thankfulness because, he says, those things are cosmic, making up the frequency of who we are as individuals.
That long-ago day in Raleigh, when Harris was a young boy frightened by the horrors surrounding him, could have hardened his heart. Instead, it became a moment that he brought with him to the campus of Georgia Tech. And that became a place where he, and so many others, paved the way for a new future.
“My drive was to take on that challenge,” Harris said. “To be elite and to show a picture of a black man who was able to go through this challenge.”
Nowadays, Harris follows Georgia Tech football closer than anyone. He is a familiar face at Bobby Dodd Stadium and around the football alumni. He’s excited for the coming generation with Geoff Collins at the helm, and he said he appreciates the way Collins connects with his roster.
“He loves his players,” Harris said of the new head coach. “When the coach loves the players, the players love the coach, and they are going to love what they are going to do every day. When a person goes to bat for you, the skies are limitless.”
Advertisement
Harris knows a few things about love, and he also knows a few things about someone standing up for others.
That day in Raleigh, he faced the full fright of hatred in a park many miles from home. The N.C. State students who took him there calmed his fears, telling him they would take care of him. A black man in a Navy uniform showed him courage by refusing to run.
But most of all, in the words of the Rev. King, Harris found a message he could take to Georgia Tech and beyond, into a better future he could shape for himself.
(Top photo: Delvin Jones / Georgia Tech Athletics)