Richard H. Harris
Richard Henry Harris, Jr. (August 22, 1918 - July 24, 1976) was a prominent civil rights leader and pharmacist. A personal friend, neighbor and collaborator of Dr Martin Luther King Jr in Montgomery, Alabama, Harris was instrumental in three of the most seminal protests of the U.S. civil rights movement: the Freedom Riders, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Selma to Montgomery marches. Harris's home, best known as the famed “Richard Harris House”, was Montgomery, Alabama’s central command center and safe haven for beaten and bloodied Freedom Riders as they traveled to Jackson, Mississippi amidst physically  violent racial rioters, National Guard protection, and Alabama segregationist authorities’ call for martial law. In 2018, the World Monuments Fund (WMF) listed Harris’ home on its World Monuments Watch list of 20 threatened cultural sites not only for the potential risk to its physical structure, but the potential risk to its historical significance and backstory. A former U.S. Army Air Force Captain, Harris was one of the U.S. military's first African American combat fighter pilots, serving with the prodigious 332nd Fighter Group's 99th Fighter Squadron, best known as the Tuskegee Airmen, "Red Tails," or “Schwartze Vogelmenschen” ("Black Birdmen