Photograph of Eleta Atwater (later Harris) who graduated high school in 1916. Her mother, Mrs. Mamie H. Atwater who is sitting for this photograph commemorating Eleta graduating from J.A. Whitted School in Durham, North Carolina.

Source: North Carolina - The Durham County Public Library - The Harris Family Papers Collection
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The Durham County Library - The Harris Family Papers Collection

Biographical Information

Charles Harris was born in 1885 in Augusta, Georgia, the son of James and Elizabeth Johnson Harris. His parents were both very musically inclined and Charles played piano from an early age.
He graduated from Paine College in Augusta, Georgia, in 1904 and studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where he met Roland Hayes, a well-known tenor.

Harris toured internationally with Hayes from 1911-1916, serving as his piano accompanist, including a performance before England's Queen Victoria. Following his touring career, Harris taught music at many colleges throughout the South. His longest tenure was at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg.
After his retirement in 1951, he taught music part time at North Carolina Central University.

In 1922, he married Georgia Eleta Atwater Harris in Durham. They had three children, Mayme, Johnny, and Eleta, who were raised in a very musical household, as evidenced by their later career choices.
He died at the age of 103 in 1988.

Georgia Eleta Atwater Harris was born in 1899 in Elberton, Georgia, to John Henry and Mamie Harper Atwater. The family moved to Durham, North Carolina, when she was young. Georgia attended Durham city schools, including the West End School, and graduated from Paine College in Augusta, GA, in 1919.
She returned to Durham and worked for the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company for 37 years. She died in 1965.

Charles and Georgia Harris's daughter, Mayme Harris Perry, was born in Durham, North Carolina, in 1924. The family lived at 612 Carr Street at the time, which was directly across from the American Tobacco factory. Mayme graduated from Hillside High School in 1941 and attended Bennett College in Greensboro. She moved back to Durham and taught English and history at Whitted Junior High School and Hillside High School. Her marriage to Robert Perry in 1952 was short- lived. She was active in the Durham community, particularly with Russell Memorial C.M.E. Church, of which her grandparents were founding members. Mayme Harris Perry died in 2007.

Mayme Harris Perry had two siblings, Johnny Harris (b. 1927), and Eleta Jean Harris Murray (b. 1929) both in Durham. Like their older sister, they graduated from Hillside High School. Both went to Talladega College after graduation.

Johnny had a highly successful career as a jazz musician, traveling the country with groups such as The Cats and the Fiddles and The Ink Spots, playing in front of many well-known people including President Bill Clinton. Johnny died in 2000.

Eleta Jean Harris married Milo Murray in 1952 in Durham and they moved to Chicago, IL, shortly after. Jean taught music in the Chicago public schools for many years and passed away in 1995. The Murrays had three children, Eleta "Cookie," Patricia "Pat," and David, who passed away in 1982.

Pat Murray moved to Durham from Chicago in 2001 to care for her aunt, Mayme Harris Perry. Pat publishes the Durham SkyWriter and is a freelance DJ. Cookie, a stage actress, has a daughter Jihan and continues to live in Chicago.

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The Scope and Contents of The Harris Family Papers Collection

The Harris Family Papers are a collection of materials gathered together primarily by Mayme Harris Perry documenting her family. The main Harris family members included in the collection are Mayme Harris Perry, her younger brother Johnny Harris, her younger sister Eleta Jean Harris Murray (and Jean's children, Pat, David, and Eleta "Cookie" Murray), and Mayme's parents Charles Harris and Georgia Eleta Atwater Harris.

It includes correspondence, photographs, newspaper clippings, publications, musical compositions, funeral programs, and scrapbooks collected or created over the years by members of the family. The materials document the life of a middle class African American family in Durham in the 20th century and their connections to other family members and professional colleagues in places including Georgia, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles.

Charles Harris was the piano player for Roland Hayes (a lyric tenor and composer and the first African American male concert artist to receive wide acclaim in the United States and abroad), and correspondence with Hayes is included in the collection.

Mayme Harris Perry taught English and history at Whitted Junior High School and Hillside High School from the 1950s-1980s, spanning the time of integration for the traditionally all Black schools.
Materials from those schools is included in the collection. She wrote famous people and politicians asking for photographs to hang on her classroom wall. That correspondence and set of photographs is part of the collection and includes several presidents such as John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Ronald Reagan, as well as people such as Bob Woodward and Mary McLeod Bethune.

Her mother, Eleta Atwater Harris worked at the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company for many years and materials from her time there are also included.

The collection also includes many materials relating to the family of Mayme's maternal grandparents, John Henry and Mamie Harper Atwater, who settled in Durham at the turn of the 20th century and were instrumental in establishing St. Matthew's C.M.E. Church (a predecessor of Russell Memorial C.M.E. Church) as well as Mayme's paternal grandparents, the Harrises, who lived in Augusta, Georgia, and were quite active in the community there.