Jerry Harris: My Mississippi

Stanford Emeriti/ae Council Autobiographical Reflections

In a lecture on Nov. 17, 2021, Jerry Harris, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus, speaks about “My Mississippi,” his meandering path through segregation, opportunity, despair, and hope. He briefly discusses his research on novel applications of seismic waves for characterizing and monitoring subsurface resources such as oil and gas as well as in carbon sequestration. Focusing primarily on his youth, Harris tells a vivid and compelling personal story of growing up on a farm in rural Mississippi, one of 11 children, attending a “separate but unequal” two-room primary school, and being the only Black student in a white high school, where he experienced episodes of hostility, exclusion, and inequitable treatment from teachers and fellow students. Attending “Ole Miss” (the University of Mississippi) a few years after it was integrated by James Meredith under National Guard enforcement, he and other Black students organized equal rights protests, one of which caused them to be arrested and expelled, though his expulsion was “suspended” and he was able to graduate with an engineering degree. Noting that Jim Crow laws, freedom marches along local highways, and Ku Klux Klan terrorism were ever-present throughout his young life in Mississippi in the 1950s, Harris stresses that the opportunities he also experienced were possible only through integration and Federal law. After working in the petroleum industry and obtaining a PhD at California Institute of Technology, he joined the Stanford faculty in 1988. In addition to teaching and research, Harris was a founding member of the Earth School’s Office of Multicultural Affairs. He describes the creation and funding of the award-winning SURGE program (Summer Undergraduate Research in Geoscience and Engineering) to increase the pipeline of minority and women students into graduate studies at Stanford and elsewhere, with the goal of creating a broad “intercultural” experience.