After tough start, Harris achieves success

Shelby Harris loves her home in Folsom. She loves her job, her family and the lifestyle she's worked hard to achieve. Growing up in the segregated Deep South as the daughter of an unmarried white man and an African-American woman, Harris never believed she would ever lead the life she has now. Harris was born in 1946 in a small town in Alabama. She was one of five children who lived in a tiny, shack-like, two-bedroom home in the country. Her family worked for white landowners, picking cotton and peaches, doing their laundry and cleaning their large, colonial-style home with other African-American families. Even as a child, Harris struggled with the reality of segregation. "It was horrible," Harris said. "As a small child I couldn't understand why I couldn't have a home like that. I didn't understand why my clothes weren't pretty like the white girls' were." She has many dramatic memories of her childhood, specifically one night when members of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter burned a cross on her front lawn, forcing her family to run out the back door and hide.Harris' situation got worse when she started school. "When I turned 6 it was time to go to school," she said. At that time children had two options of where to go - 'the black school or the white school.'"Being half-African-American, Harris said she was sent to "the black school." Her mother knew she wouldn't be welcome anywhere else. But on the first day of school she found she wasn't welcome there either. "They told me I was at the wrong school," said Harris, who figured it was because of her light complexion and blue-green eyes. "My home was 10 miles away so I had to sit outside on a doorstep and wait for the bus to come back. I cried." The next day, Harris returned. While she was eventually accepted, she knew she didn't fit in. "I stuck out like a sore thumb," she said. "I don't remember anyone looking like me. When you don't look like anyone else, for a young child, that's hard. Every opportunity I had I would cut school. I missed a lot." She'd spend her days hunting and fishing. Her poor attendance eventually caught up to her. "When I was in the third grade, I didn't know my ABCs," said Harris, who eventually failed the grade. Luckily for her, Harris' grandmother stepped in and took the 7-year-old to Anniston, Alabama, to live with her in one of the largest cities in the state at the time. What Harris remembers about starting her new school was that her African-American principal was also a fair-skinned woman. "For the first time I saw someone like me," Harris said. "This was the principal and she looked like me." With this positive reinforcement, Harris said she changed her attitude. She got a seat at the front of the class, built her confidence and "re-established" herself in the classroom and in life. She finished elementary school, graduated from high school at the top of her class and went on to college, where she earned a degree in home economics and later a masters in counseling. She pledged a sorority, married and had three children. Her husband, Samuel, was in the military and the couple eventually ended up in Folsom. The two have lived here for 18 years. Harris, 59, now works for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Department where she has excelled. Starting out a clerk, she was quickly promoted to an officer and then to supervisor. "I think (Harris') story is amazing," said friend and co-worker Sharon Rummery. "Shelby has been a co-worker of mine for years and I never knew the story of her childhood until recently. Learning her story, I was saddened that she had to go through that, but I'm not surprised that she popped right up to the top." And with success she's also found happiness."I really like my job," she said. "This is a really good time in my life."