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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 very inspiring life for someone whose greatest prospect as a young 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.

Willie’s story is gripping, poignant, and inspirational. The cold brutality of life under Jim Crow in Mississippi is laid bare in frank detail but is offset by the love and strength of his mother Evie, who worked steadfastly to keep him safe and give him a glimmer of hope for a better life. He grew exponentially in the Air Force where he was shocked to find he became best friends with two white hillbillies and surprised that he did not experience the racism in the service that he faced his whole life. Most astonishingly, he fell in love with a white woman, and they were married in the early 1960s, when it was still illegal to do so in 19 U.S. states. Simultaneously, the Air Force took advantage of his tremendous athletic ability—he was 6’8” tall and an agile mountain of a man—and caused irreparable damage to his knees by giving him weekly painkilling steroid injections, just so they could keep him on the basketball court.

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.

Tim Shea graduated from Providence College in 1987 with a degree in English. He worked for four years as a newspaper reporter, and since 1993 he has held a variety of posts at a well-known university in New Haven, CT. Shea was inspired to document Willie Harris' story-as well as those of many people who endured the same conditions-after hearing him speak on National Public Radio in 2016.

Willie Harris was born on August 8, 1941 into a dirt-poor sharecropping family on a cotton plantation near Lexington, Mississippi. He served in the United States Air Force from 1962 to 1967, and then joined the Black Stuntmen's Association (BSA), a group dedicated to fighting the racist practices that prevented Black men and women from being hired as stunt performers in Hollywood productions. Willie was named president of the BSA in 2004 and was instrumental in the group receiving honors and awards from the United States Congress, the NAACP, and having its story and memorabilia included in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He died on November 28, 2021.