Almost every day, the Associated Press publishes an exhaustive list of “sports transactions.” Yet the most historically significant front-office decision of this past National Football League season went unnoted in the wire-service litany. On January 31st, James Harris, the first black man to regularly start as quarterback for an N.F.L. team, who was also part of the first wave of black executives in the league, retired from his position as senior personnel adviser of the Detroit Lions at the age of sixty-seven. In his characteristically understated fashion, Harris had asked the Lions not to issue a formal announcement, so it was several weeks before even the Lions’ own Web site produced a brief retrospective of his forty-six-year career in the N.F.L.
The closest thing Harris had to an official public farewell came earlier this month, at the induction ceremony for the Black College Football Hall of Fame, an institution that he and his friend Doug Williams, another history-making black quarterback, helped create. Even that tribute—there was a screening of an N.F.L. Network segment, and Harris was presented with a personalized golf bag—had to be sprung on him by surprise.
“On nights when I went to play, my mother, who was not a football fan, would say, ‘Do your best and the Lord will do the rest,’ ” Harris said from the podium in his self-effacing fashion. “On nights like this, it makes me feel that the Lord did his part.”
I was attending the event because I had written about one of the hall’s newly enshrined members, Ken Riley, of Florida A. & M. and the Cincinnati Bengals, in a book about the civil-rights movement and the football programs of historically black colleges. James Harris also figured prominently in the book, and I knew firsthand about his determinedly unassuming persona. It took me a year and a half just to get an initial interview, but I persisted because of something the football player-turned-author Pat Toomay had said: “He will take his time deciding whether he trusts you, but it’s worth the wait. He is perceptive and he is deep.”
Harris, who was every bit as thoughtful as predicted, once told me that the reason he agreed to meet that first time was my interest in how football intersected with the freedom movement. For all of his modesty, Harris possessed a very clear sense of his role in that history. He linked his determination to play quarterback to the experience, as a high-school junior, of watching Martin Luther King, Jr., deliver the “I Have a Dream” speech on the family television set.
For my part, I came to think of Harris’s nickname—Shack—as the decoder ring to his character. Shack is short for Meshach, one of three captive Jews in the Book of Daniel who refused to bow down to the alien god of Babylon and miraculously survived Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. (The name came from his father, a Baptist Minister.) The alien god to which James Harris refused to prostrate himself was the doctrine of white supremacy—the repugnant and encompassing Jim Crow system that controlled the South while Harris was growing up in Monroe, Louisiana, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. In one emblematic story, Harris told me about how his mother, a nurse, occasionally sent him to the gas stations with instructions to get just a few dollars’ worth of gas for the family car. But the white man who ran the service station would fill the tank, so that the Harris family remained perpetually in debt to him.
Amid the oppression of the segregated South, Harris thrived on the football field. He was an all-state quarterback on a state-championship football team in high school. In order to continue to play quarterback in college, Harris turned down a scholarship offer from Michigan State, which wanted to turn him into a tight end. At the time, there was a persistent color barrier throughout college and professional football: no matter how successful they were, black quarterbacks were forced to change position—to receiver, to running back, to defensive back—and cede their responsibilities to the white players who were believed to be smarter and better leaders. So Harris went to Grambling State University, a historically black school, to play quarterback under the legendary head coach Eddie Robinson. The two men shared the single goal of preparing Harris to crack the color barrier in the N.F.L.
Despite being snubbed in the 1969 pro draft, in which he ended up as an eighth-round pick, Harris won the starting job for the Buffalo Bills and made history as a rookie by becoming the first black quarterback to start a season opener. He was waived by Buffalo after three years, seemingly ending his career, but found a place on the roster of the Los Angeles Rams. In 1974, Harris led the team to a division title and a playoff win; he topped the conference in passing efficiency and was chosen as M.V.P. of the Pro Bowl. Before the next season, in 1975, Sport magazine put Harris on its cover with the headline “Will James Harris Be The First __* To Play Quarterback In The Super Bowl?” In a footnote, the cover specified, “*Los Angeles Ram,” but the implied question was clear: Would Harris be the first black quarterback in the championship game? It was one milestone that Harris didn’t have a chance to reach (Doug Williams would do it twelve years later, with Washington). The Rams’ front office overruled its head coach, Chuck Knox, and over the course of several seasons brought in no fewer than four quarterbacks—Ron Jaworski, Pat Haden, Joe Namath, Vince Ferragamo—to try to unseat Harris, despite his 21—6 record as a starter. Finally, in 1977, the Rams shipped Harris to San Diego, where he finished his athletic career, in 1981.
For years, Harris could not find a pro or college team willing to hire him as a coach. He spent a few years operating a small business with his brother, back in Monroe. Then, in 1987, one of his former coaches, Ray Perkins, hired him as a scout for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “During that time, the players who got into scouting, most of them got it with the team they played for,” Harris recalled. “To get it with another team was harder, because people thought if you hadn’t played there you didn’t want to do the dirty work. You had to prove that you were a foot soldier and would do whatever it took to get the job done. On every level, it was always working your way through challenges.”
From the Bucs, Harris went on to become an assistant general manager for the New York Jets and then a player-personnel executive for the Baltimore Ravens, where he helped put together the team’s 2001 Super Bowl championship team. He then moved to the Jacksonville Jaguars, as the vice-president of player personnel. In 2007, the team reached the divisional playoffs, but the next year it sank to 5—11. Harris was fired. Just as when the Bills waived him, his career looked to be prematurely over. Instead, the Lions’ new general manager, Martin Mayhew, brought him on as a personnel adviser. Since 2009, Harris helped to transform the Lions from a winless laughingstock to this year’s 11-5 playoff team—its best season in twenty-three years. But to merely recite Harris’s résumé, impressive as it is, is to elide the most essential part of his career: the obstacles he overcame, the adversity and outright bigotry he encountered, the doors he opened for the black quarterbacks and front-office executives who followed in his wake.
“We know that the history of the N.F.L. can’t be written without mentioning James Harris,” Ozzie Newsome, the Baltimore general manager, wrote in a recent e-mail. “He was an outstanding player who broke barriers in the league for all African Americans.” As for Harris’s front-office skills, Newsome noted, “When we worked together, he was as good of a teammate as anyone I’ve ever encountered. No task was either too big or too small for him to tackle. He was always thorough and humble through the process. As a personnel executive, he has a keen eye not only in spotting talent, but in knowing what a team needs to succeed.”
In six weeks since his retirement, instead of assessing talent at the N.F.L. Combine, auditioning free agents, and making plans to attend college stars’ pro days, Harris has spent time with his relatives in Los Angeles and frequented the golf course. “I retired from football, and golf retired from me,” he said wryly. “I still play, but my golf ball is disobedient.”
John Wooten, the chairman of the Fritz Pollard Alliance, an organization that advocates for racial diversity in the N.F.L., said that he hopes Harris’s retirement package will include a place on the league’s advisory board of former players, coaches, and executives. “Shack should be on it for a lot of reasons,” Wooten said. “As a player, as a quarterback, his body of work in personnel, coming all the way up the pipeline to [assistant] G.M. Go back and look at what he accomplished and who he helped. The guy is just an amazing person who hasn’t been recognized for what he brought to the table.”
A few weeks ago, I asked Harris about his plans. “I’m an old quarterback,” he said. “There’s two minutes left on the clock and it’s time-out to call the next play.” From someone else, those words might sound trite or evasive. From James Harris, they echoed with the quiet deliberation of a man who rejected his assigned place as a black man in a bigoted era in order to define his own legacy.
