Mickey Leland

George Thomas "Mickey" Leland was born on the twenty-seventh of November 1944 in Lubbock, Texas, to Alice Leland and George Thomas Leland II. His father left the family while Mickey was still a small child, and his mother carried her sons to Houston, where she put herself through school, became a teacher, and raised him in the Fifth Ward. From that upbringing he drew a lifelong tenderness toward the poor and the overlooked.

He graduated from Phillis Wheatley High School and, in 1970, earned a degree in pharmacy from Texas Southern University, a historically Black institution in Houston, where he afterward taught. Drawn into the civil-rights currents of his era, he entered the Texas House of Representatives in 1972 before winning, in 1978, the U.S. congressional seat vacated by the trailblazing Barbara Jordan.

Representing Texas's eighteenth district from 1979 until his death, Leland became a forceful voice for the hungry and the dispossessed. He chaired the Congressional Black Caucus and founded and chaired the House Select Committee on Hunger, carrying its mission far beyond America's borders to the famine-stricken villages of Africa. He believed hunger anywhere was an affront to human dignity everywhere.

On the seventh of August 1989, on his sixth journey to Africa, his aircraft crashed into a mountainside in southwestern Ethiopia as he traveled to a refugee camp; he perished with fifteen others. Mickey Leland died as he had lived — reaching toward the least among us. May his compassion be remembered, and his name honored.