How This Book Came About
In May 2016 I was listening to NPR as I drove to work when Morning Edition host David Greene introduced an episode of StoryCorps featuring two pioneering members of the Black Stuntmen’s Association (BSA), Willie Harris and Alex Brown. They spoke about the dangerous life of a black stuntman in Hollywood in the late 1960s and 1970s, a time when they were generally unwelcome on the set. Refusing to be denied, they fought through the racism and established themselves in the movie business. The conversation turned to Willie’s early life in rural Mississippi, where he survived the Jim Crow South of the 1940s and 1950s, and eventually returned with his stunt brothers where they were honored at the state capitol for their activism in Hollywood. After hearing Willie talk for a little over two minutes, I was hooked. I said that he has an amazing story of struggle, survival, and triumph that must be told, and I would like to be the person who helps him tell it. I found the phone number to his home in Las Vegas, called him up, and told him what I proposed to do. He enthusiastically said, “Let’s do it!,” and our journey began.
For the next several years I interviewed Willie dozens of times, and did many more interviews with his family members, fellow stuntmen and stuntwomen, childhood friends who grew up picking cotton with him, friends from the Air Force, attorneys who represented the BSA, and other voices from Mississippi and Hollywood. I researched the history of Mississippi and the South since the Civil War, Willie’s time in the Air Force, and the fight for equal opportunity waged by the BSA. I spent two days on Clifton Plantation where Willie grew up and I walked the same cotton fields cultivated and harvested by Willie, as well as countless sharecroppers and enslaved people before him. I stood on the bank of the creek where he fished with his mom, and I explored the ruins of Mileston High School where he became a superb basketball player. I visited Willie’s home on two occasions, and spent time with him and the members of the BSA the weekend in 2016 when they attended the opening of the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which displays the group’s artifacts.
Getting to know Willie so well and listening to him talk about everything he had experienced was a great honor for me. This book would also not have been possible without the dozens of people who generously shared their stories with me, and I am very grateful to all of them. The manuscript for the book was completed in 2021, but sadly, Willie died in November 2021 and did not live to see its publication. I present this book in tribute to his legacy.
-Tim Shea
February 2024
