Patricia Roberts Harris

Patricia Roberts was born on the thirty-first of May 1924 in Mattoon, Illinois, the elder of the two children of Bert Fitzgerald Roberts, a railroad dining car waiter, and Hildren Brodie Johnson Roberts. From modest beginnings she rose with singular brilliance, graduating summa cum laude from Howard University in 1945, where she also joined the student movement against segregation.

After graduate study and years of civic work, she earned her law degree from George Washington University in 1960, finishing first in her class. In 1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson named her United States Ambassador to Luxembourg, making her the first African American woman to serve as a U.S. ambassador. She would also serve as dean of Howard University's law school.

In 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed her Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, making her the first African American woman to hold a position in the United States Cabinet. When a senator questioned whether she could understand the poor, she answered that she was a Black woman, the daughter of a dining car waiter, who had known what it was to be denied. In 1979 she became Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, which under her stewardship became Health and Human Services, making her the first person to hold two distinct Cabinet posts.

She died in Washington, D.C., on the twenty-third of March 1985. May we honor Patricia Roberts Harris, who carried the dignity of her origins into the highest halls of the nation and opened doors that had never before been opened.