Willie Harris Collection shows SU, black history

Throughout the month of October, the late Willie Harris photo collection was displayed in the art gallery at the Smith Brown Memorial Union.
Harris was instrumental in building and modernizing the University’s Police Dept.
In his spare time, Harris was a freelance photographer. His photographs appeared in the local black newspaper, the Newsleader (Baton Rouge, Monroe, Alexandria, Lake Charles, Morgan City, Thibodaux, and Houma), The New Orleans Weekly and the Southern Digest.
After his death in 1992, James Terry, Harris’s neighbor, found over 40,000 photographs that had been bagged and put on the curb for trash pickup.
Receiving help from his friends and some local photographers, Terry and his friends sorted the “find”.
There have been fifty “interactive exhibits” displaying Harris’s collection.
“People can touch and identify with these pictures”, says Terry, the friend who is attributed for creating the gallery with Harris’s collection. Terry also stated that about twenty albums have been donated to the new library so that the community may see them and also identify some of the people in the pictures.
Some of the pictures taken were of Muhammad Ali, Doug Williams and his brothers and even Lynn Whitfield, who also attended Southern University.
Two books have been published depicting the Willie Harris Collection. They are entitled Our Story, Our Glory Pt. 1&2. The third book will be out in November.
“We have a very proud heritage,” said Terry. “It is up to one of us to get the ball rolling, and it is up to someone else to keep it going after we are gone.”

Gallery • 1 Photos

This photo believed to be dated between 1914-1916 was taken of Felton & J.S. Clark, the founders of Southern University. This photo is one of many in the Willie Harris collection that will be a permanent feature in the John B. Cade Library.