Early Life and Education
Harris was born in Fresno, California. After graduating from Fresno High School as "Boy of the Year" in 1963, Harris enrolled in Stanford University. He soon became involved in the Civil Rights movement, traveling through the Deep South to join other students in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's Freedom Summer voter registration campaign in Mississippi. In 1966, he was elected student body president at Stanford, serving a one-year term. As a counter-protest, Harris's head was forcibly shaved by a gang of masked members of the Delta Tau Delta fraternity that had many football players as members and apparently a pro-war outlook. Harris was also future Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's dormitory RA during Romney's sole year at Stanford.
Read more about this topic: David Harris (protester)
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“They are girls. Green girls.
Death and life is their daily work.
Death seams up and down the leaf.
I call the leaves my death girls.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)