Published February 29, 2024
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“Big Man is a captivating biography of a Black Mississippi sharecropper who rises from the life of a sharecropper in the Jim Crow South to a career as a Hollywood stuntman, brilliantly documenting this man’s peculiar racial challenges all along the way. His story is both compelling and provocative; representing truth-telling at its very best.”
— Elijah Anderson, Sterling Professor, Yale University
Willie Harris is an American icon. Born into a Black sharecropping family, he was raised picking cotton on a plantation in Mississippi in the 1950s, though his childhood sounds more like a tale from the 1850s. He played Division I college basketball, served in the U.S. Air Force, and as one of the leaders of the Black Stuntmen’s Association in the 1970s, he helped wage a battle against racism in Hollywood that changed the film industry. He and his fellow warriors received the NAACP President’s Award, were commended by the United States Congress, and their story is told in the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
That’s a pretty inspiring life for someone whose greatest prospect as a boy was to drive a tractor. He was battered, beaten, and broken, but never defeated, and he did it all with an infectious smile and generous humanity that makes you very thankful you got to know him.
This is a story about the American Dream and the many ways that forces in America conspired to crush that dream for many of its citizens. It is also a story about a man who fought with determination and purpose, refusing to be denied a taste of the sweet nectar of true freedom.
