Kenneth Harris Jr. has had a great career as a musician. The Arkadelphia resident was just named a Living Legend of Music by the National Baptist Convention USA at New Orleans in September.
“The award recognizes those who have been in the music ministry in the convention for more than 40 years,” Harris said. “I was honored and elated to be given such recognition at the national level.”
Think what he could have accomplished if music had been his main career.
Harris has a doctorate in education and was a professor in the Teachers College of Education at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia for 35 years. He served as chairman of the department of curriculum and instruction at the school. He has also taught public school in Arkansas and Nevada.
“I really always knew I wanted to be a teacher,” Harris said. “My father was one of 32 kids, and that family has a history of teachers. Several cousins are teachers; my sister is a principal of a school in Los Angeles. There is no branch of my family tree without a teacher or two. My wife is a teacher, and so is my daughter.”
Since his retirement, Harris still teaches as a professor emeritus at Henderson State University and has missed only two summer sessions — the first after his retirement, and this past summer.
“When I first retired, I just needed to get away and learn how to be retired,” Harris said. “Within a few weeks, I was thinking about what I could teach in the fall.
“I like feeling I am moving forward. If I stop, I am afraid I won’t be able to get started again.”
It appears that Harris has been immersed in music as much as in education. Born in Fordyce, he grew up in nearby Thornton. He attended what he called a small rural, segregated public school in Thornton. While it was a poor school, he said music was always a part of the school day.
He was the youngest of six children when he asked to take piano lessons. His mother traded hairdressing sessions for her son’s lessons with the area’s piano teacher. In his high school in Thornton, Harris joined the band.
“I started on the bass drum, but then I moved to trombone and tuba,” Harris said. “I was also interested in the clarinet and saxophone. I was the assistant choir director at the high school while I was still a student. The teacher was from Texas, and when she would go home for the weekend, I conducted the choir for any weekend concerts.”
Once while leading the choir at a high school music festival, Harris met a professor of music from Philander Smith College in Little Rock.
“His name was Carl Gordon Harris Jr.,” Kenneth Gordon Harris Jr. said. “We were no relation, but it was a way he remembered me.”
Kenneth Harris was offered a music scholarship to the college, and he started in the fall, but he soon discovered that he enjoyed playing music much more than he enjoyed studying it, and he left the school. He switched to Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical & Normal College, now known as the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, and earned a degree in education.
He was a student teacher in Fordyce, a step that surprised a lot of his friends in Thornton.
“The schools were big rivals, and I broke the molds when I did my student teaching there,” Harris said. “I remember waiting for the bus back to Pine Bluff, where I was to finish my degree, when the principal of the school drove by and got out of his car and walked up to me.”
Told that his mentor for his student teaching had retired, Harris was offered the job to take her place, he said. He accepted, and after finishing his degree, Harris began his teaching career in the same room teaching the same lessons he had used as a student teacher.
As Harris talked about how his career had started, he said we needed to back up a bit to 1962, when his parents moved the family from rural Arkansas to Las Vegas, Nevada.
“They moved out there for a job,” he said. “I started my 10th-grade year there, but moving from a small black school in Thornton to a huge integrated school in Las Vegas was just too much of a culture shock for me. One day, I just got too worked up, and I fainted in the classroom.”
Harris said his favorite saying is one he learned from his father: “If it doesn’t fit, don’t force it.”
“I didn’t fit in Las Vegas,” Harris said, “so I came back to live with my grandmother in Fordyce.”
Now jumping back a few years, Harris said that after his first year of teaching in Fordyce, he spent the summer in Las Vegas and applied for a teaching job there to be near his family. He said he was told it was too late in the summer to apply, but later that day, he received a call from the principal of a school in Las Vegas.
Harris was hired as a teacher in what was called a “prestige school,” much like a magnet school today.
“It was a school for kids who didn’t do well in a traditional school,” he said. “We didn’t have grades for the kids; I just taught kids. We had everything you could ask for, including a psychologist working with the teacher. There were high expectations, but they gave us their full support.”
After a couple of years at the Las Vegas school, Harris became engaged to a teacher named Pamala who taught school in the small rural Arkansas town of Sparkman. He returned to Arkansas and got a job teaching in the Hot Springs School District, where he began to use the teaching methods he had learned in Nevada. Soon, he said, college professors from Henderson came to observe his teaching.
After Harris said finished his master’s degree at Henderson, he was recruited by the president of the college, who had grown up just a few miles from Harris’ childhood church. It was another stage, but a comfortable fit for Harris.
He taught at the school his entire career, leaving only to earn a Doctorate of Education at East Texas State University, now Texas A&M-Commerce. While earning his doctorate, he and Pamala worked as church musicians.
In Arkadelphia, where Harris and his wife still live, they have been working together as musicians at Greater Pleasant Hill Missionary Baptist Church, where he is minister of music and a deacon. He plays the organ, and his wife is at the piano on Sundays. To keep the education-music fit close, it is worth noting that the pastor of the church is Lewis Shepherd, who is vice president of student and external affairs at Henderson.
Harris said he enjoys life in Arkadelphia.
“I have spent 32 years on the school board, and I am a member of the Arkadelphia Racial and Cultural Diversity Committee,” he said. “This is a good place to call home.”
Staff writer Wayne Bryan can be reached at (5012) 244-4460 and wbryan@arkansasonline.com.