Parren Mitchell

Parren James Mitchell was born on the twenty-ninth of April 1922 in Baltimore, the youngest of ten children of Clarence Maurice Mitchell Sr., a hotel waiter, and Elsie Davis Mitchell. He came of age in a family destined to shape the civil-rights century: his brother Clarence Mitchell Jr. would become the NAACP's chief Washington lobbyist. Parren graduated from Frederick Douglass High School in 1940 and soon answered his country's call.

Serving as a commissioned officer with the 92nd Infantry Division in World War II, Mitchell was wounded in combat in Italy and received the Purple Heart. Returning home, he confronted segregation directly: with the support of the Baltimore NAACP he sued the University of Maryland for admission to its graduate school and won, becoming the first African American to earn a master's degree in sociology there, in 1952. He had already taken his bachelor's degree at Morgan State.

In 1970 Mitchell won Maryland's 7th District seat by a razor-thin margin, becoming the first African American elected to Congress from the state. Across sixteen years he chaired the Congressional Black Caucus and the House Small Business Committee, and earned lasting renown as the principal architect of federal minority-business set-asides — most famously the 1977 amendment reserving ten percent of public-works funds for minority contractors, upheld by the Supreme Court.

He died on the twenty-eighth of May 2007 in Towson, Maryland, at the age of eighty-five. Parren Mitchell opened doors that had been barred for generations, and through the enterprises he made possible his name endures in the livelihoods of countless families. We honor him.