Mfume, Kweisi

October 24, 1948

Civil rights leader, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and former U.S. congressman Kweisi Mfume was born Frizzell Gray in Maryland, the eldest of four children, and grew up in a poor community just outside of Baltimore. His mother, Mary Willis, worked on an assembly line for an airplane parts manufacturer. His stepfather, Clifton Gray, abandoned the family when Mfume was twelve years old. Four years later, his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Devastated by his mother's death, Mfume dropped out of high school and began working odd jobs to make ends meet while he and his three sisters lived with relatives. Mfume found that he could make much more money hustling on the streets than working for wages shining shoes or pushing bread through a slicer.

By the age of twenty-two, Mfume's life seemed to have completely spun out of control; he had five children with four different women, gang life was becoming deadly, and a number of his closest friends had been killed in Vietnam.

Mfume resolved to turn his life around. He began taking night GED courses for his high school equivalency degree and then enrolled at Baltimore Community College. Mfume developed a keen interest in politics in the early 1970s while working as a disc jockey at local radio stations. During this time, he changed his name from Frizzell "Pee Wee" Gray to Kweisi Mfume (a West African Igbo name roughly translating as "conquering son of kings").

In 1976 Mfume graduated magna cum laude with a degree in urban planning from Morgan State University. Two years later, he parlayed his growing fame as a talk-radio provocateur to win a seat as a maverick Democratic Party member on the Baltimore City Council. Mfume served two terms on the city council and then went on to graduate school at Johns Hopkins University, where he received an M.A. in political science. In 1986 he won the seat of the Seventh Congressional District vacated by his political mentor, Parren J. Mitchell. Mfume went on to serve five terms in U.S. Congress, rising to the position of chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Mfume's campaign to end apartheid in South Africa earned him the friendship of Nelson Mandela in the early 1990s. However, while he supported democracy abroad, Mfume remained more committed to the preservation of the Democratic Party than the expansion of independent electoral options for African Americans. During the 1990s he joined other black elected officials in limiting the growth of a multiracial political movement that attempted to challenge the control of the electoral process by both major parties. In 1996 Mfume left Congress to lead the NAACP, where he pursued corporate donations to retire the organization's debt. Mfume resigned from his post as president of the NAACP in 2004.

The recipient of seven honorary doctoral degrees, Mfume serves on the board of trustees at Johns Hopkins University and the Enterprise Foundation. His autobiography, No Free Ride: From The Mean Streets to the Mainstream, details his life.

See also Civil Rights Movement, U.S.; Congressional Black Caucus; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Politics in the United States

Bibliography

Mfume, Kweisi. No Free Ride: From The Mean Streets to the Mainstream. New York: One World, 1996.

Robinson, Alonford James, Jr. Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African American Experience. Edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Oxford: Perseus, 1999.

omar h. ali (1996)
Updated by author 2005