Biography

When the teenage Bunk Harris was baptized on 27 August 1903 in Crenshaw County, Alabama, he reported that he had been born in Bradleyton, in that county, on 11 March 1885, the son of Elizabeth Harris. He was then living in Glenwood, Crenshaw County. [1]

These facts, recorded by Barney E. Tilby of Spring City, Utah, who baptized him, and Delbert M. Packer of Oneida County, Idaho, who confirmed him, are the only certain facts now known about the life of Bunk Harris. He is likely the farm laborer of that name enumerated in Glenwood, Alabama in 1910 (although the enumerator reported him as being about four years older than the baptismal record indicates). [2] At some unknown time, a clerk updating mission records wrote “Left country” next to the indication of “colored” that had earlier been noted on his record. [3]

“Bunk Harris,” as either a formal given name or nickname, is surprisingly common in the South of the early 20th century, for both black and white men. Research for this report has followed a dozen such men without any clear connection to the Latter-day Saint Bunk Harris. The man who appears most prominently in internet searches is a Bunk (or Punk, or Gilbert) Harris who was lynched by hanging in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on 1 August 1922. This man, however, appears to have been considerably younger (10 years or more) than the Bunk Harris of the LDS membership record. This is noted as a caution to future researchers who may take up the search: beware of assuming identity based solely on name.

As a personal note, the name immediately below Bunk Harris’s name on the membership ledger is L.M. Hall, my great uncle; a few lines below that appears the name of Lella Edith Hall, my grandmother. Most of the Halls, Hawkins, and Hendersons on this page are members of my extended family. [4] Crenshaw County, Alabama, where Bunk Harris was born and baptized, is one of the several places my family struggled to make a living as sharecroppers, a life that must have been familiar to Bunk. My family almost certainly knew him, but there is no one left from that generation to ask. I have tried my very best to trace this man in order to write a fitting memorial for him, and it is a great disappointment that I was not more successful than finding his baptismal record and a census report. Even still, Century of Black Mormons remembers Bunk Harris here.

By Ardis E. Parshall

Primary Sources

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Record of Members Collection. State of Alabama. CR 375 8, box 34, folder 1, image 50; Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah.

United States. 1910 census. Alabama, Crenshaw County, Precinct 10 (New Providence).

Documents

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