Cleveland Harris, N.F.L. Coach Who Pushed for Diversity, Dies at 79

Cleveland Harris had a dream.

As one of the National Football League’s top running-backs coaches, he had a reputation for getting the best out of his players, who revered him.

He hoped one day to become a head coach, at the time a rarity for a Black man in the N.F.L.

After the 1996 season, the league had 11 head coaching vacancies. Harris, who grew up in the Jim Crow South, was never even considered. All 11 positions were filled by white men.

Although he never fulfilled his dream of being a head coach himself, he pressed the league to make changes that helped open the door for future Black head coaches.

He died at 79 on Jan. 6 at his home in Atlanta. His daughter Tarana Mayes said the cause was cancer.

In 1997, Harris, who was known as Chick, led a group of nine Black assistant coaches in a meeting with the league’s commissioner, Paul Tagliabue, with the aim of finding a system in which minority candidates would be considered for head coaching jobs. The league was made up largely of Black players but had had only four Black head coaches in the modern era.

“We tried to give the commissioner information about our feelings and tell him how people around the country felt,” Harris, then the running-backs coach of the Carolina Panthers, told reporters afterward. “Any dialogue can raise consciousness.”

Tagliabue said Harris had been diplomatic and reasonable. “He didn’t come across as severely wronged,” he recalled in an interview. “He was the type of guy to reason and listen. He was a very articulate guy. But was there anger at the meeting? Yes.”

Gerald Carr, then the wide-receivers coach of the Philadelphia Eagles, who attended the meeting, said Harris had been “integral” to the gathering.

“He described the pathway: How do we get there? And how do we get in front of the owners?,” Carr said. From that discussion emerged the idea of establishing a process in which top minority candidates would meet with owners at their regular meetings. “We wanted them to know us, not just know of us,” Carr said.

Herman Edwards, who was then the assistant head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, said the group had not asked for any special consideration for Black coaches. “The whole idea is, you should be hired on your ability to coach, not just because you’re Black,” he said. “But you have to have the opportunity.”

In 2001, the New York Jets hired Edwards as their first Black head coach.

The 1997 meeting nudged the league toward taking action. In response to a 2002 study commissioned by the lawyers and activists Cyrus Mehri and Johnnie Cochran Jr., titled “Black Coaches in the National Football League: Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities,” the league created a workplace diversity committee to address its hiring practices.

In early 2003, to promote minority hiring, the two men created the Fritz Pollard Alliance, an advocacy group named for the player who in the 1920s became the league’s first Black coach. And that year the league adopted the Rooney Rule, which required teams to interview at least one minority candidate for any head coach opening. (The rule was named after Dan Rooney, the chairman of the diversity committee and the owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers.)

The rule has since been expanded to include openings for coordinators and general managers. It requires teams to interview at least two minority candidates for those positions.

Some critics have assailed the Rooney Rule as window dressing, saying that some teams still ignore minority candidates or interview them knowing that they won’t be hired. In the years since the rule took effect, however, about 30 minority assistant coaches have risen to interim and full-time head coaching jobs.

Cleveland Harris was born on Sep. 21, 1945, in Durham, N.C., and raised by his single mother, Shirley Sims, a domestic worker, who was 14 when she gave birth to him. His father was Cleauthor Harris.

Cleveland, who became known as Chick at a young age, loved football and watched games at North Carolina Central University, a historically Black school in Durham. Typically for that time and place, he had no white friends and had to sit in the back of public buses.

So it was a novel experience when, on a stopover in Chicago on a train trip to Long Beach, Calif., in 1957, when he was 12, he sat down at a restaurant with mostly white people.

“I went to the counter and took a place there,” he said in 2020 in an interview with Ms. Mayes, his daughter, on Story Corps, the oral history project. “And they asked me what I wanted, and I told them I wanted fried chicken.”

They brought him fried chicken. No trouble, no questions asked. It was a revelation.

After high school, Harris enrolled at Long Beach Community College in California, where he played football as a receiver in 1963 and 1965. After moving to Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, he played defensive back and running back in the 1967 and 1968 seasons. He graduated in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in education.

He began his coaching career as a graduate assistant for Northern Arizona’s football team. Beginning in 1970, he went on to assistant coaching jobs at Colorado State University and what is now California State University, Long Beach; with the Detroit Wheels of the short-lived World Football League; and at the University of Washington.

Chuck Knox, then the head coach of the Buffalo Bills, hired Harris as a running-backs coach in 1981. He stayed in Buffalo for two years, then moved with Knox first to the Seattle Seahawks in 1983 and then to the Rams in 1992. After two seasons in Los Angeles, Harris was promoted to offensive coordinator.

“Chick Harris has done an outstanding job,” Knox said then. “He brings experience, dedication and the ability to motivate players.”

Harris was known for getting the best out of running backs, including Curt Warner of the Seahawks, Jerome Bettis of the Rams and Arian Foster of the Houston Texans.

He left the Rams in 1995 for the Panthers, where Dom Capers was the head coach, and then followed Capers to the Texans in 2002.

“No matter the situation, he was upbeat, and he had an infectious personality,” Capers said. “He could be tough and demanding, but the players loved Chick.”

When the Texans hired a new head coach in 2014, nearly all the assistants were dismissed, and Harris retired. After that, he conducted clinics for high school and college players.

In addition to Ms. Mayes, he is survived by another daughter, Kara Harris; his son, Tyler; four grandchildren; and three half sisters, Callista Cass and Robin and Cheri Womack. His marriages to Cheryl Avants and Karen Brown ended in divorce.

In all, Harris coached in the N.F.L. for 33 years. At one point, Ms. Mayes said, his goals were limitless. In 1987, he delivered a speech in Seattle about his dream of becoming a head coach.

When that didn’t happen, Ms. Mayes said, he focused on being the best assistant coach he knew how to be. And after being named offensive coordinator for the Rams, she added, “I’m not sure those aspirations remained.”

“Dad was always most concerned about the team concept and his players,” she said. “Returning to running backs coach allowed him to serve both his teams and his players.”