Biography

Dr. Harris is the first tenured African American faculty member in the Department of Urban Planning in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. As an educator, Dr. Harris has trained hundreds of planning students, has been featured by numerous organizations as a speaker on the topics of planning practice, racial equity and social justice, and has been engaged in opportunities to inform the general public about the important of planning as a strategy for strengthening vulnerable communities of color. Additionally, Dr. Harris has over two decades of experience as an executive in the non-profit sector and presently is the Founder/President and CEO of Parent and Community Technology and Law Center, a not-for-profit organization focused on community building and family strengthening through systems and policy change initiatives.

Over the course of a twenty-five-year career, Dr. Harris has aggressively advanced policies and practices that more effectively support vulnerable families and communities. Dr. Harris has served as a Legal Services lawyer, served as the senior vice president and general counsel for Family Support America (a nationally recognized family support non-profit), and worked as a community development professional and neighborhood advocate for Shorebank Advisory Services (a division of the once nationally prominent community development bank, South Shore Bank). During the 2008 Presidential Campaign, Dr. Harris served on then Sen. Obama’s Metropolitan and Urban Policy Committee, charged with informing the campaign's public policy platform. Dr. Harris worked closely with White House staff of the Obama administration and other national leaders on issues related to community building and family strengthening. Dr. Harris has testified before Congress on the intersecting issues of poverty, family strengthening and community development. Dr. Harris is a proponent of youth development, and for his leadership in that area, The Wisconsin Daily Reporter named Dr. Harris the Architectural Leader and Newsmaker of the Year in 2007 for his groundbreaking work related to the development of a charter public high school focused on urban planning and architecture that served vulnerable urban youth of color. In 2017, the organization that Dr. Harris was leading was among the organizations that received Mutual of America’s highly coveted national Community Partnership Award for the effective and extensive community collaborations and networking partnership it fostered through its community-based initiatives.

Currently, Dr. Harris serves as a featured national spokesperson for the American Planning Association’s (APA) national effort to promote equity and social justice in planning practice amongst its national membership.

Lived Experiences

“#BlackLivesMatter”, the continued racial injustice put on public display in the George Floyd murder, and the grossly racialized impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on vulnerable communities of color have stimulated a domestic and international discourse that seeks to challenge racial injustice and economic inequality by organizing against it. I have had to grapple with issues of economic vulnerability and racial disadvantage very early in my own life experience as a kid growing-up in the inner city and I continue to grapple with these issues as an adult who is committed to ensuring America lives up to its democratic promise.

I grew-up during the height of the Civil Rights period. In 1967, the social unrest in Newark, New Jersey took place and is forever etched in my memory. I was in elementary school then. School was out and the summer was hot, literally and figuratively, as the emotions of the most racially oppressed segments of our nation boiled over. The decade of the 1960’s provided witness to the dramatic internal struggle for social and economic justice in America, gave witness to the deaths of President Kennedy, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and brought in sharp contrast America’s claims to being the most democratic nation in the world.

That summer, I was on an outing with my mother and my siblings at the Dairy Queen in downtown Newark, New Jersey. My twin sister, my brother and I were sitting in our old Ford station wagon with holes in the floorboards and wooden side panels that were popular in the day, waiting for our ice cream cones. Suddenly, we saw my mother bolt for the car without the ice cream cones and we sped away from the Dairy Queen. The next thing I saw and heard was a big bottle crashing against the glass of the rear window of the station wagon. My mother said her suspicions were raised by the odd behavior of the Caucasian males who were hanging around the Dairy Queen, which is why she decided to leave so quickly. That day was the first day of a week of unrest in Newark, but Newark was only one of a few places in which unrest was happening.

As a child, that experience caused me to wonder about a number of things. Why were those men at the Dairy Queen angry enough to throw a bottle at our station wagon? What was at the core of the unrest happening in Newark and other cities? What should cities and their citizens do about the unrest? What should the country do about this tension and anger and where does it come from? I came to understand how the plight of African Americans was inextricably linked to individual attitudes, governmental policies and institutional practices that contradicted the iconic symbol of America as the world’s leading democracy and the home of the “free and the brave.” The exploration of that paradox became the foundation of my personal and professional quest. It is why I studied government and public policy at the graduate level, why I decided to go to law school, and why I committed myself as a planner to place racial equity and social justice at the core of my policy and system change efforts and planning work.

My commitment as an academic and as a practicing urban planner focused on social planning is to respond to the demand for change. At the core of planning practice is the idea of advancing a democratic commitment that lessens the paradox that is America.