First black space walker, former Texas Tech regents talks education with Lubbock audience

The first black astronaut to walk in space — a Texas Tech medical school graduate and former Tech regent — on Thursday shared his message of following one’s dreams with a Lubbock audience.

Dr. Bernard A. Harris Jr. visited with an audience of about 100 people at the Science Spectrum Museum, promoting his new book “Dream Walker.”

The message of his book, and a goal in his life, is to inspire children and young adults to follow their dreams, he told the audience during a presentation in the museum’s Omni Theater.

“When I talk to young people, I tell them how important it is to dream ... and I hope that this book will let them take from this that it is never too late to fulfill one’s dreams,” he said.

Harris, a 1982 graduate of the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center, was also the first physician to practice in space such procedures as conducting an entire physical and inserting an intravenous tube into a human during his two missions with NASA in the mid-1990s.

He also served as a Texas Tech regent in the late '90s and currently oversees his namesake Harris Foundation philanthropic organization promoting education in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Harris, 54, said he was thankful for his life’s achievements, especially considering the struggles he overcame growing up with an alcoholic father in the then-struggling inner-city Houston neighborhood, The Heights.

He said it was escaping that neighborhood with his mother by moving to a Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona that gave him a goal in life.

Harris recalled looking into the night sky over the Arizona desert.

“That is, looking up in the heavens and wondering what it would be like to go up and be among the stars,” he said.

Harris said he was also inspired by astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous first words after stepping on the moon in 1969: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”

Hearing that, he said, inspired him to become an astronaut, despite not having a black role model in the space program during that era.

“For me to decide that I wanted to be an astronaut was kind of a giant leap of faith,” he said.

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