Rita Harris was an organizer in the Sierra Club Environmental Justice Program in Memphis, Tennessee, from 1999 to 2017, when she retired and then, in 2020, won election to the national Sierra Club Board of Directors. Harris was born and raised in the 1950s in a segregated Black community in South Memphis where she played piano and sang in her Baptist church. As a child on family road trips, she developed a love of both the outdoors and travel. As an adult, she joined a Pentecostal Church and married Alex Harris, an Air Force veteran. Together, they bought land and overcame racial barriers to build a home in Olive Branch, Mississippi, just south of Memphis, where they raised their three children. In the 1980s, Harris volunteered as a Girl Scout troop leader and was soon hired to their executive staff to organize camps, trainings, and outdoor adventures. In the 1990s, Harris worked at the Mid-South Peace and Justice Center in Memphis, a multi-issue social justice non-profit, where she led their South African Taskforce against apartheid, which included several visits to South Africa. Harris became engaged in environmental justice with Mid-South Peace and Justice, attended the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington, DC, in 1991, and began raising community awareness about toxic pollution in Memphis. She led toxic tours throughout the city several times each year, published an annual report of Shelby County's worst polluters, and hosted in Memphis an annual conference on environmental justice. In late 1999, Harris began work as a community organizer with the Sierra Club Environmental Justice Program. She partnered on campaigns in impacted neighborhoods across Memphis with community leaders, elected officials, and organizations, including the Concerned Citizens of Crump, the Bloomfield Baptist Church, and the Sierra Club's Chickasaw Group. Harris helped lead several successful campaigns, including against RACE, LLC, a radioactive waste management company; against Dixie-Narco for contaminated well water; and against the Tennessee Valley Authority as part of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign. Harris initiated and led Dismantling Racism trainings for Sierra Club staff and volunteers, served on the Club's Diversity Council, and received the Virginia Ferguson Award in 2011 for her consistent and exemplary service to the Sierra Club. She also served several terms on the EPA's National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC). Harris retired from the Sierra Club in 2017, and in 2020, she won election to the national Sierra Club Board of Directors. In this oral history, Harris reflects on all of the above, with emphasis on the relationships she fostered and the successful strategies she employed throughout her career working for social and environmental justice in Memphis.
