Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,777

This is the grave of Patricia Roberts Harris.

Born in 1924 in Mattoon, Illinois, Patricia Roberts was a child of the Black middle class. Her father was a sleeping car porter, the kind organized by A. Philip Randolph into the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. He technically worked as a waiter on the trains. This was as good a job as a Black man could hope to get at this time and it also allowed unprecedented travel and mixing with other Black folks around the country, leading the porters to play a critical role in spreading news about the various freedom struggles around the nation.

With the nation slowly changing, it was possible for the daughter of a porter to attend college and that’s what Patricia Roberts did. She attended Howard and graduated in 1946. She was also a civil rights activist, having participated in a lunch counter desegregation protest in 1943 in Washington. Yes, we have long forgotten that almost every tactic used successfully in the late 1950s and 1960s by the civil rights movement had precedent in the past, which those activists knew about, but we don’t. She went to the University of Chicago for graduate work in industrial relations from 1946-49, but missed the civil rights activism of Washington, so transferred to American, where she eventually did receive a master’s degree. While in Chicago, she worked for the YWCA and when she went back to Washington, she worked as Assistant Director of the American Council on Human Rights from 1949 to 1953.

Roberts married William Harris in 1955. She was really frustrated by her career path, which was mostly in education but where she felt limited by segregation. He encouraged her to try and different career and that led her to law school. She went to George Washington and finished in 1960, the top-ranked student in her class. Harris was both deeply committed to the civil rights movement and to the Democratic Party and unlike many civil rights activist, saw work within the Democratic Party as a great way to push forward the ciivl rights struggle. As she was also an outstanding organizer, she found herself a rising star. In 1963, John F. Kennedy named Harris co-chair of the National Women’s Committee for Civil Rights, which was a giant umbrella group of existing organizations. I don’t think this committee really accomplished a lot, but it gives you a sense of the growing esteem for Harris in the highest circles of the party.

Harris was a delegate to the 1964 Democratic National Convention from Washington, D.C. and seconded LBJ’s nomination. She thought the SNCC-based Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party overreacted in its attempt to unseat the white delegates in 1964, arguing later in this oral history for the LBJ Library that they won a lot by forcing that state to have a more democratic process in the future but that they were “sore-headed” about it. Let’s put it this way, Harris knew who buttered her bread and it was the Democratic Party under Lyndon Johnson.

LBJ paid off Harris by naming her ambassador to Luxembourg in 1965. She stayed there two years. In those years, she was also an alternative delegate to the United Nations on issues of human rights. She left the government in 1967 and went back to Howard, to teach law. She became dean of the law school in 1969. She was very much a company woman. When students protested in those radical years, she took such a strong stand against them and their ideas of Black Power that the president of Howard fired her, as students seem to have made their protests about her.

Harris was fine though. She went to an elite law firm and was named to the board of directors for IBM. She was still young, but she was already able to bask in that sweet, sweet corporate cash that well-connected politicians get. She was also on the board of Chase Manhattan and other big-time companies. But she remained deeply involved in Democratic Party politics, including becoming chairwoman of the Credential Committee in that batty year of 1972. Her competence and insider/outsider status made her close to Jimmy Carter and when he became president after winning in 1976, he was going to pay her off big time.

Carter named Harris as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 1977. She became the first Black woman Cabinet member, so this was a big deal. William Proxmire, who was a blowhard to be fair, asked her with some legitimacy whether someone so highly connected to corporate America was to rich to be HUD Secretary (imagine a senator of either party being concerned with whether someone was too wealthy to be in the Cabinet today…) and she used her background with some legitimacy and some definite cynicism to deflect all her corporate ties, replying “I am a Black woman, the daughter of a Pullman (railroad) car waiter. I am a Black woman who even eight years ago could not buy a house in parts of the District of Columbia. I didn’t start out as a member of a prestigious law firm, but as a woman who needed a scholarship to go to school. If you think I have forgotten that, you are wrong.”

Harris headed HUD for two years. She was a pretty effective head and shifted the agency from its traditional love of slum clearance to promoting rebuilding programs, marking the effective end of the Urban Renewal Era, though she was hardly alone there. But really, she was quite effective, turning HUD into a hack agency for the housing industry into something that really did try to work toward reviving inner cities. So in 1979, Carter gave her a promotion to Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, which became Health and Human Welfare after Education was spun off to its own department in 1980. But by this time, the Carter administration was a shitshow of incompetence and freaking out over inflation (OK, with some justification) and she was really unable to do much at all there. Carter’s advisers and really Carter himself stopped her from doing the kind of civil rights enforcement she wanted and she got very frustrated in her last year working for Carter. So did just about everyone. He was really a very bad president.

Harris left government in 1981 when Reagan was elected. George Washington hired her as a law professor. She ran for Mayor of DC in 1982, but Marion Barry defeated her. Alas, Harris came down with breast cancer and it killed her in 1985, at the age of 60. She could have done a lot more had she lived another twenty years. Alas. I wonder what her position vis-a-vis the Clintons would have looked like. She was a very good party woman, but then if she was frustrated by Carter, well……

Patricia Roberts Harris is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.

If you would like this series to visit other members of the Carter administration, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Carter of course will never die and has done a great job of killing off all the members of his Cabinet, a modern Angela Lansbury in Murder She Wrote, really. Cyrus Vance is in Arlington and James Schlesinger is in Springfield, Ohio. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.