By Jim Belshaw
Of the Journal
I suppose I could dial up Google Maps and find out exactly how far it is from Walters, Okla., to the Sorbonne, but for general purposes of figuring out the arc of a life, let's just say it's a long way.
Nonetheless, last June, there was Fred Harris, 77, a son of Walters, Okla., lecturing at the Sorbonne on subjects that brought him to the center of a good deal of American history— race and poverty.
On March 1, 1968, the Kerner Riot Commission, appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson and largely the creation of then-Sen. Fred Harris, issued its report on conditions in America that brought about some of the most violent time in the country's history.
Of the riots that brought death and destruction to American cities, it famously concluded: "America is moving toward two societies, one white, one black, separate and unequal."
Forty years later, the Eisenhower Foundation has released an update to the Kerner Commission report.
Tonight, those issues will be re-examined on "Bill Moyers Journal," KNME-TV, Channel 5, at 9 p.m. In the course of that examination, Moyers will be speaking with Fred Harris.
Harris, who retired recently from the University of New Mexico after a teaching career that began in 1976, had served in the U.S. Senate, had run for the presidency and to this day continues the work that brought him into public life so long ago.
Lives have a way of unfolding in mysterious ways, even to those living them.
So when I get the chance, I like to ask a question: How did all this begin?
Fred Harris smiled and said, "Well, I don't know. I really don't know. These have always been critical issues for me, and I don't know why."
He looks back at his Oklahoma childhood and sees no explanation. (A recently written memoir, "Does People Do It?," will go on sale April 15 and addresses the question in more detail than we can here.)
"When I was in school in Walters, which had a population of maybe 1,500, no black people lived there," he said.
He had no black classmates in law school at the University of Oklahoma, and he had no relatives in Mississippi who might have sparked an interest in civil rights issues.
"I've always wondered how I got so interested in race and poverty," he said. "Unlike my Mississippi relatives who grew up in the Baptist church, I grew up in the Baptist church, too, but for some reason I saw things differently from the way they did."
In 1968, working with John Lindsay, then-mayor of New York, Harris walked the streets of American cities, speaking with young, unemployed men hanging out on the corner. Back then, he said, people told him they wanted to work, they wanted jobs.
He says he heard the same things today at hearings to update the Kerner report.
"A lot of people think we solved all that, but we didn't," he said. "We did a lot of things back then that worked, but we aren't doing those things now. We have 37 million people living in poverty today. We have 47 million people without health insurance. And it's shameful that America ranks 22nd in the world in infant mortality, which of course is a euphemism for 'Your baby is dead.' ''
He's spent a lifetime wrestling with what many see as intractable problems.
He's still working on an explanation for it all.
"Well, there was the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address and all that 'created equal' stuff," he said. "I believed it."
Write to Jim Belshaw at The Albuquerque Journal, P.O. Drawer J, Albuquerque, NM 87103; telephone— 823-3930; e-mail— jbelshaw@abqjournal.com.
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