Dr. Harris Black Lives Matter Show "Open Mic Night"

By Hannah Brandt

“Being the only Black minister in Fresno on the front lines, in the trenches, I have a bulls-eye on me. But I am okay with that because being on the front lines gives people hope.” Dr. Floyd D. Harris, assistant pastor of New Light for New Life Church, grew up in West Fresno in the 1970s and 1980s. He credits his grandmother who raised him for what he knows and the work he does now. He feels that she gave him a foundation as a young man to follow in her footsteps as an activist.

Growing up, Harris lived in a “falling-down house on a dirt road without streetlights or garbage pickup.” West Fresno had been forsaken by city officials, especially once construction of Highway 41 in the late 1960s decimated the Black business district and cut off this African-American area of town from the rest of the city. Through it all, Harris was always impressed by his elders’ ability to “take nothing and turn it into something.”

As a little child running around the house, he paid attention to his grandmother’s meetings where he became aware that “these older Black people did not have the same rights as White people.” Why was it that his family had to dig a hole in the backyard for their trash and then incinerate it instead of having trash pickup on the street like in White neighborhoods in Fresno? At a young age, he realized that “these meetings were people coming together to make life better for me and future generations.”