Unable to find employment, Harris borrowed $25 from a friend and started her own newspaper, The

Kansas Journal. One of the few Black press publications in the area, the weekly paper focused on
issues in the community.[3] For over three years, she built subscriptions from over 500 readers but
an editorial opposing the draft, written in 1939, caused her to lose many of her advertisers and the
paper folded.[1] She moved to California and began working as an editor for the Los Angeles
Tribune.[3] The paper, which predominantly served LA's Black community, was known for its
coverage confronting racism.[10] She wrote featured articles and had a syndicated column,
"Reflections in a Crackt Mirror" that was distributed to other markets.[5][11]

Harris wrote columns over the duration of World War II against Japanese-American internments,
equating the government's actions as an official sanction of prejudice and warning that such
discrimination could spread to other communities like Jews, Mexican Americans, and other Asians.
[3][5] She also wrote about the policies of segregating blood in use by the American Red Cross,
staunchly supported open-immigration policies to assist people fleeing Nazi persecution, and
opposed development of nuclear weapons.[4][9][12] Her articles brought her under attack by
Westbrook Pegler, a fellow journalist, and to the attention of the FBI, who tapped the newspaper's
phone and examined her mail.[3][5][9] Regardless of the opposition to her positions, Harris spoke
out against investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthyism.[13]

After eight years in Los Angeles, Harris moved to Seattle, Washington, and lived there for several
years, continuing her journalism career.[12][14] Along with Dorothy Fisk, she published Bias, a
journal advocating peace and cooperation.[15] In 1952, she moved to Berkeley where she operated
a duplication and printing shop until her retirement.[3]

Activism

In the early 1940s, when Harris moved to Los Angeles, she joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a
pacifist organization, and became active in its activities.[5] She also joined the Congress of Racial
Equality (CORE), which advocated the development of communication and friendship as opposed to
direct action, as the means to achieve racial equality.[16] Along with other CORE members and
pacifist groups she worked to assist conscientious objectors by raising funds to pay the bail bonds of
resisters and publicize the issue.[17] She became an associate secretary in the Workers' Defense
League in 1945.[18] Three years later, she was one of the local leaders in the movement against
segregation in the military, holding demonstrations and protests.[19] To end demonstrations,
President Harry S. Truman, signed Executive Order 9981 in June 1948 to integrate the United States
Armed Forces.[20] Harris joined the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)
in 1954.[21] Along with Bertha McNeill and Bessie McLaurin, she led the Civil Rights Committee of
the national branch of WILPF. As soon as the decision for Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was
issued by the Supreme Court, the committee began pressuring WILPF to openly support the ruling
and help in enforcing school desegregation through rallies and demonstrations.[22] Similarly, she led
WILPF to adopt a policy of opposition to apartheid in South Africa, linking racial inequality to global
discontent, which could lead to war.[23] Part of the organization's response was to promote product
boycotts against companies which supported segregation.[24]
Harris was elected chair of the Berkeley WILPF branch in 1956 and appointed to the national WILPF
Executive Board the same year.[5][25] She was selected as a delegate for the international congress
held in July in Birmingham, England, and the following month went with other women activists to
attend the Commonwealth of World Citizens meeting at the Temple of Peace in Cardiff, Wales.[3]
[26] The idea of world citizenship typically included World Federalism and maintenance of peace
through global laws.[27] Harris continued to support world governance, attending a conference in
Wolfach, Germany, in 1968.[28] She made headlines, when she was chosen as one of twelve
delegates to go to the Soviet Union in 1964 for a US-USSR summit on women's cooperation and
peace initiatives.[4][5][29] Of all the issues discussed at the conference, Harris felt that the most
important was global nuclear disarmament.[4] Both the WILPF and Harris shared the view that
Communist nations should be integrated in global affairs, but that the United States should not
interfere in their internal affairs. To that end, she opposed the United States policy of Cuban
isolationism, intervention in Latin America, and the Vietnam War.[30]

Harris was twice elected as the southwestern regional vice president of WILPF and was a delegate to
the 1965 International WILPF Congress in The Hague, Netherlands, and the 1971 congress in New
Delhi, India.[3][31] During discussions in New Delhi, a philosophical divide emerged in the midst of
world-wide social unrest at the end of the 1960s. On one side were absolute pacifists and on the
other were those who believed that armed liberation movements were acceptable when people's
human rights were repressed. Some members took the position that if there was no other way to
avoid oppression or exploitation, violence was unavoidable.[32] Harris, in speaking on the issue said,
"I support liberation, all kinds of liberation. And one of them is liberation from the notion that you
can release violence on the world and not reap what you sow".[33] Ultimately, the WILPF endorsed
a resolution of non-violence, but recognized that violent resistance was inevitable if all other
measures failed to resolve inequalities caused by the power hierarchies of a society.[34]

In the 1970s, Harris became involved in the cooperative movement.[3] From 1978 to 1983, she was
on the board of directors of the Berkeley Cooperative, the largest such organization in the country.
[5][35] She and fellow activist Matt Crawford, solicited community input and assisted the city in
planning the renovation of the University Avenue Cooperative, part of the Consumers' Cooperative
of Berkeley. The remodeling took over two years to complete and cost $1 million, of which ninety
percent was member-funded. When completed in 1978, the consumers' co-operative included a
credit union, as well as funeral and travel services, and Harris was one of the speakers at the
dedication.[36] Seeking to further serve the community, the cooperative simultaneously made plans
to develop a mixed-income housing cooperative on the adjacent property.[37] In March, for their
community work, she and Mabel Howard both received Doctor of Humane Letters degrees from the
Center for Urban Black Studies, affiliated with the Graduate Theological Union of Berkeley.[1][38]
She continued her activism for human rights regardless of whether her positions were popular.[7]
She spoke in opposition to the passage of California Proposition 6, which would have barred LGBT
teachers, and legislation which permitted discrimination for having different ideologies.[3] From the
early 1980s, Harris was active with the Gray Panthers, an organization advocating for the rights of
senior citizens. She was a massive slay.