Harris, Patricia Roberts

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Harris, Patricia Roberts

May 31, 1924
March 23, 1985

Educator, lawyer, and politician Patricia Roberts was born in the blue-collar town of Mattoon, Illinois, where her father was a Pullman porter. She attended high school in Chicago and then enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She became active in civil rights causes at Howard, participating in one of the nation's first student sit-ins at a segregated Washington cafeteria and by serving as the vice chairman of a student chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

After graduating in 1945, Roberts returned to Chicago, where she briefly attended graduate school at the University of Chicago and worked as program director at the Chicago Young Women's Christian Association. In 1949 she returned to Washington and accepted a position as the assistant director of the American Council on Human Rights. In 1953 she became executive director of Delta Sigma Theta, a black sorority, and two years later, she married Washington lawyer William Beasley Harris.

Patricia Roberts Harris entered George Washington Law School in 1957. Upon graduation in 1960 she accepted a position as an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice. The following year she joined the Howard University Law School faculty, where she also served as the associate dean of students. In 1963, with the support of the Kennedy administration, Harris was chosen to cochair the National Women's Committee for Civil Rights, a clearinghouse and coordinating committee for a wide range of national women's organizations. She also served on the District of Columbia advisory committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

In 1965 Harris became the first African-American woman to hold an ambassadorship when she was appointed envoy to Luxembourg. She held the post until September 1967, when she rejoined the faculty at Howard University. In 1969 she was appointed dean of Howard Law School, becoming the first black woman to head a law school, but her tenure lasted only thirty days. Caught between disputes with the faculty and the president of the university over student protests, Harris resigned.

Harris then accepted a position with a private law firm—Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Kampelman—and also held a number of positions in the Democratic Party during the 1970s, such as the temporary chairmanship of the credentials committee. Harris became the first black woman cabinet member when she was nominated by President Jimmy Carter to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1976. She held the job for two years, and in 1979 she became secretary of health, education, and welfare (renamed the Department of Health and Human Services in 1980), serving until 1981.

In 1982 Harris ran for mayor of Washington, D.C. Running against Marion S. Barry in the Democratic primary, she lost a bitter contest in which she was depicted as an elitist who could not identify with the city's poorer blacks. She spent her remaining years as a professor at George Washington National Law Center before her death in 1985.

See also Barry, Marion; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Politics in the United States; United States Commission on Civil Rights