Councilman tries to pass on mother's message

SIKESTON, Mo. -- It was a year of house parties and garage funk bands and the electric bugaloo. Michael Harris and his friends were trying to have the best time they could for the least amount of money.

He was a high school junior in 1978, the sixth of 13 children who grew up on Thompson Street in the predominantly black, mostly poor Sunset neighborhood.

The police drove through but rarely stopped. The drug trade flourished.

Harris and his brother, Alonzo Jr., joked about putting up a sign on Sunset's east side, one of two boundaries with the white neighbors.

"Entering Dodge City," it would read. Or maybe, "Wild, Wild West."

And then Carrie Harris sat her son down.

"Michael, you really need to look at your life," she told him. "Some people would like to see you stay behind the tracks with a joint in your mouth."

Her admonition left his face burning.

He got a job at a tire shop. He got his high school diploma. He went to college.

And today, as the second black man ever to serve on the Sikeston City Council, Michael Harris is trying to impart his mother's message to youngsters on Sikeston's West End today, who to him don't seem a whole lot different than youngsters 23 years ago.

Nine of the 13 Harris children have college degrees. This year, Michael Harris became the first to receive an advanced degree: a master's in human services administration.

He is a calm man who speaks in measured tones and reflects for a moment before he responds. His secular work is as a job placement coordinator for Sikeston High School, and he seems comfortable in his painted cinderblock office with its one small window, which overlooks a drafting class next door.

But he has many titles and works out of many offices. He serves on the boards of five agencies devoted to helping Sikeston and its residents: the Business Research Institute, the Weed and Seed steering committee, Mission Missouri soup kitchen and outreach center, the Sikeston Community Credit Union (the area's only black financial institution) and the Bootheel Healthy Start Consortium.

Building a future

Harris, 40, was elected to the council in April, fulfilling a longtime dream of holding office. He wants to build a future, not only for the community, but for his wife, Maude, and children Najawa, 19, Brenda, 18, Sloane, 11, and Kellar, 10.

His father, Alonzo Harris, 79, campaigned for Michael. The retired plumber knew his son could win an at-large election, one that would require votes from both blacks and whites.

"He is the type of person who has time to talk to everybody," he said. "He tries to help people out. He's just a good kid."

Michael Harris' mother didn't live to see her son fulfill his dream in the political arena. Cancer claimed her four years before the election.

As a young man, Harris' mentor was Donald Fulton, a retired educator and Sikeston's only black mayor, who died in 1996. Harris was a popular student, but the attitudes outside the walls of Sikeston High School bothered him.

"There was safety behind the tracks," he said of the neighborhood where he grew up. "Once you left to the other side, you were in a different world.

"Community wide, there were a lot of stereotypes around at that time. There was a lot of mistrust."

Both blacks and whites struggled with that feeling. When Harris' grandfather, J.L. Nabors, moved from Sunset across the tracks onto predominantly white Ruth Street in 1977, his former neighbors gasped. They couldn't understand why a black Baptist minister would want to live there.

But the minister endured the ire of his former neighbors and the stares of his new ones, and his neighborhood slowly became more racially diverse.

Harris, who lives about a half-mile south of the house where he grew up, wants the children he sees growing up in Sunset today to be able to move anywhere they want without stares. It's part of the reason he ran for office, adopting the slogan: "Michael Harris: A councilman for all citizens."

Early promise

His first employer voted for him. Harris was a senior in high school when James Brock gave him his first serious job at the Firestone tire store. Harris went to school with Brock's daughter, Judy.

"I could see in Michael a person who would excel in something," said Brock, 63. "I didn't know what it was going to be, but he always took his job seriously."

Today, Harris' serious job is addressing the city's "social ills," he said, including whatever made the population drop 649 people in the past 10 years, according to 2000 census.

"It concerns me," he said. "I think some people aren't getting out and working, and that perpetuates crime. We are right at I-55 and I-57, so the opportunity for drugs to come in is increased. The city is dealing with those issues the best it can right now."

He points to the relatively quiet summer under new DPS chief Drew Juden -- unmarred by the almost weekly clashes between loiterers and police on the West End that marked the previous summer.

And now he wants a recreation center for the neighborhood where he grew up. Perhaps in the old Lincoln school, formerly the black high school under segregation, now a decaying brick structure blighting the middle of Sunset.

There are three more years left in his term. He's already planning to run again.

"I think Sikeston is a good place to live and a good place to raise a family," he said. "Chances are, I will be here until I pass on."

hhall@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 121