Julia Florida Collier was born in Atlanta on November 11, 1875 to Susan Rawson Collier and Charles A. Collier, once Atlanta's mayor. She graduated from Washington Seminary, and then attended a finishing school. She studied art at Cowles Art School in Boston and planned to pursue it as a career. But the death of her mother in March 1897 forced her to abandon her art career plans and return home to care for her younger brothers and sisters. Her father died in 1900 under what she considered suspicious circumstances. She married Julian LaRose Harris in October 1897. The son of Joel Chandler Harris, Julian was a journalist who had started with the Atlanta Constitution at age sixteen and later became their youngest managing editor. The couple had two sons, both of whom died in childhood in 1903 and 1904.
Career
She began her own journalism career in 1911 at the Atlanta Constitution as well, writing on literary topics, the arts and club news. She was also state editor for the Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs. Around this time her husband Julian was business manager for his father's Uncle Remus Magazine. But his father died in 1908 and the magazine folded in 1913. And so the couple moved to New York City where Julian wrote for the New York Herald and Julia wrote for their Herald Syndicate under the pseudonym Constance Bine. She wrote a series of features for Herald from Paris, and as a result she was one of only two women who were present at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1918. Harris was the first biographer of Joel Chandler Harris and her 1918 book remains a primary resource for scholars of his work. She was also later instrumental in establishing a collection of his papers at Emory University's Robert W. Woodruff Library. In 1920 the couple moved back to Georgia and pooled their money to purchase an interest of the Columbus newspaper Enquirer-Sun. In their editorials and other writing for the paper, they opposed a pending Georgia bill to ban the teaching of evolution, fought the Ku Klux Klan and espoused other progressive ideas. As a result of this work, the Columbus Enquirer Sun won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. It was the first Pulitzer Prize to be awarded to a Georgian. Harris, her husband and Mildred Seydell were the only journalists from Georgia who reported in person from the Scopes Trial in 1925. Outside of her career, Harris was active in the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching and the League of Women Voters.
Death and legacy
She spent her later years in a nursing home, where she continued to write. She died in 1967 and was buried in the Rawson family vault at Atlanta's historic Oakland Cemetery. She has been posthumously inducted into three different Georgia halls of fame. In 1996 she was inducted into the Georgia Newspaper Hall of Fame. In 1998 she was inducted into the Georgia Women of Achievement. In 2019 she was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. Her papers are held at Smith College and her husband's papers are held at Emory University.
