AUBURN — A memorial service honoring the life of Gordon Harris, one of the original Freedom Riders of 1961, will be held Saturday at the First Universalist Church of Auburn.

Harris, 74, of Auburn, died Sept. 14 after a long struggle with Huntington’s disease. He was born in Charleston, S.C., and lived for years in the Washington, D.C., area. He was a Quaker minister and devoted his life to civil rights.

Harris was one of 400 Freedom Riders who in 1961 went to the deep South, risking his life and freedom, to challenge segregation, or Jim Crow laws.

Harris served as a Winthrop pastor for five years until Huntington’s disease began to take over. The progressive, degenerative disease causes nerve cells to deteriorate.

He was often seen in his motorized scooter with his little dog, Sky. He was known in the community for his volunteer work in schools, hospitals and the library, where he took his dog to be read to by children.

On Wednesday, the Androscoggin County Democratic Party announced it is establishing a lifetime achievement award in Harris’ name, Rep. Peggy Rotundo, D-Lewiston, said. 

Rotundo knew Harris through their membership in the Lewiston Friends Meeting, known as Quakers. She called him a man of “enormous integrity and courage, who played a crucial role in one of the most important chapters of our nation’s history.”

As a Quaker, Harris believed that God is part of every human being. “His life embodied this faith which he put into practice throughout his life, even when it put him in peril,” Rotundo said.

In a May 1, 2011, Sun Journal story about the 50th anniversary of the Freedom Rides, Harris said in 1961 he was 23, a college student in Rochester, N.Y., and answered a call for freedom riders. He was assigned to ride the train from New Orleans to Jackson, Miss., with a group of 15 to 20 others, a mix of blacks and whites.

As the group rode the train, Harris and other whites sat in the “colored” section, blacks in the “whites only” section. “I was arrested, and dragged to the paddy wagon and taken to jail,” Harris said in 2011. As jails filled with Freedom Riders, the national media began to cover the movement. “A year later a law was passed, finally, that segregation in interstate traffic was illegal,” Harris said.

He said being a Freedom Rider changed his life. Harris spent years advocating the rights of others. He worked for the NAACP in Mississippi, marched to Montgomery, Ala., with Martin Luther King Jr.

In the 1970s he spent a year in Ireland working in the peace movement. He eventually returned to the North, joined the Quakers, went to a seminary and began pastoral work, which brought him to Maine.

His move to Maine was “just in time to welcome the Somalis. You see some of the same discrimination, the same anger,” Harris said last year. It happens, he said, “for no good reason.”

One way to change a mass culture mistreating a group of people is “by speaking truth to power,” he said. Showing up and being there says a lot, he said.

The memorial service for Harris will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday at the First Universalist Church, 160 Pleasant St., Auburn.

[email protected]

https://www.sunjournal.com/city/story/1016983