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.”