Degree for educator is still pushed

ATHENS, Ga. --- A group of University of Georgia students might be near the end of a two-year quest to see that a black educator gets the UGA degree denied him more than a century ago.

Samuel F. Harris is known as one of the men who built the public education system for black students in Clarke County and in Georgia.

Harris was the first principal of Athens High and Industrial School in 1917. Five years later, Athens High became the state's first public high school for black students to gain accreditation. Harris remained the principal until the year he died and is one of the people Athens' Burney-Harris-Lyons Middle School is named for.

But in 1895, Harris was a black man of 20 -- and studying at the University of Georgia, where blacks were forbidden. UGA did not admit its first black students until 1961.

White professors allowed him to audit classes, and some gave Harris private lessons, said UGA senior Timothy Evans, who spent much of the past two years documenting Harris' life.

The professors who taught Harris petitioned university administrators to grant him a degree, but the request went nowhere, Mr. Evans said.

UGA awards about three posthumous degrees a year to students who completed or nearly completed their course work before they died. Harris' UGA education was off the books, and the students have struggled to find evidence to back up historical accounts of Harris' life.