Born: January 17, 1899, Richmond, VA

Education: Virginia Union University, B.A., 1922; University of Pittsburgh, M.A., 1924; Columbia University, Ph.D., 1930

Died: November 16, 1963, Chicago, IL

Influenced by his professors at Virginia Union, Harris earned graduate degrees and became a distinguished economist. His research and advocacy helped define problems of race and class in labor relations and economic thought.

While teaching at Howard University, he embraced Marxist analysis. He and Sterling Spero did in The Black Worker: The Negro and The Labor Movement (1931). A seminal study of “the relation of the dominant section of the working class to the segregated, circumscribed, and restricted Negro minority” (Review of The Black Worker, 1932, p. 128), the book argued that an interracial working-class struggle would be needed to end racial segregation in unions and the workforce. Harris restated that argument to the NAACP's Amenia Conference (1933). In his 1935 report to the NAACP Board of Directors, never adopted, he urged a labor-organizing rather than legal strategy against Jim Crow. He co-created Howard's conference on blacks in the Depression (1933), resulting in its Social Science Division, the National Negro Congress, and his The Negro as Capitalist: A Study of Banking and Business among American Negroes (1936). Harris left for the University of Chicago (1945), its second black professor, where he achieved scholarly distinction in economics.