Henrietta Harris

Henrietta Harris attended San Jose State College briefly in 1933, and then from 1936-1940. She graduated in 1940 with a degree in Music. Harris grew up in San José on N. 7th Street, and moved to the East Bay after graduating. At SJSC, Harris was a leader of the Negro Youth Association of San Jose, and a member of Tau Mu Delta, the honor society for music majors. During World War II, she worked as a welder at Richmond's Kaiser shipyard, and after the war as a library clerk at U.C. Berkeley. Harris was an accomplished singer and performer whose stage career began at SJSC and continued on after her relocation to Berkeley, where she took the role of sorceress in "Dido and Aeneas" in a U.C. Berkeley production. Some of her favorite types of music to sing included Bach, German Lieder, and spirituals. She continued her acting and singing career while living in both New York City and San Francisco, and became a well-respected acting and voice teacher as well as the founder of the African American theater group, the Aldridge Players-West. Harris passed away on March 8, 2017 at the age of 100. Her oral history is available at U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library.