[1][2][3] Harris earned good grades and graduated from the University of Vermont on time in July 1838, ranking fourteenth in his class of twenty-four students.
He taught at a Black school, served as secretary of a local African American reform society, spoke at a racially integrated meeting of the local Female Benevolent Society, and acted as secretary of a “Union Meeting of the Colored People of Albany, Troy and Vicinity," calling for collective action among the Capital Region's African Americans.
[1] After graduation, Harris moved to New York City and then to Philadelphia, where he quickly became a prominent activist and speaker in African American and abolitionist circles and befriended Daniel Alexander Payne and Theodore S. Wright.
A delegate to the first convention of the Liberty Party, Harris supported political action to end slavery and opposed the resettlement of African Americans in Liberia.
His obituary ran in about a dozen newspapers across Pennsylvania, New York, and New England, including The Liberator, The Colored American, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Rochester Daily Democrat, the Boston Atlas, and the New-York Commercial Advertiser.