Charles Diggs

Charles Coles Diggs Jr. was born on the second of December 1922 at Detroit, the son of Charles Diggs Sr. — a Detroit funeral director and Michigan state senator from 1937 to 1944 — and Mayme Jones Diggs. The Diggs Funeral Home founded by his father at Detroit in 1921 was the largest Black-owned business in Michigan at his birth. He completed Detroit's Miller High School in 1940 and entered the University of Michigan but withdrew to attend Fisk University in 1942.

He served the United States Army Air Forces from 1943 to 1945 in the segregated 477th Bombardment Group at Tuskegee. He completed the mortuary-science degree at the Wayne State University Mortuary College in 1946 and entered the family Diggs Funeral Home business. He took also the bachelor's at Wayne State in 1951 in business administration.

He was elected to the Michigan State Senate in 1950 — at twenty-eight, succeeding his father in the same seat — and to the United States House of Representatives in 1954 from the new Michigan Thirteenth Congressional District. He took office on the third of January 1955 — at thirty-two, the second African American congressman from Michigan after Charles Roxborough.

He served thirteen consecutive terms across twenty-six years from 1955 to 1980. He was the senior African American member of the House through the 1960s and 1970s and the founding chair of the Congressional Black Caucus at its January 1971 constituting meeting. The Caucus's founding thirteen members elected him as the first chair the same month.

He served also as chair of the House District of Columbia Committee from 1973 to 1979 — supervising the implementation of the 1973 District Home Rule Act under which Walter Washington (placed in this archive) became the first elected District mayor — and as chair of the House Subcommittee on Africa from 1969 to 1978.

He was convicted in October 1978 of mail fraud relating to congressional staff payroll practices. He served seven months at the federal prison at Maxwell Air Force Base from June 1980. He left Congress in January 1981.

He died of complications of cardiac surgery at Washington on the twenty-fourth of August 1998, at seventy-five.

He is honored here as the founding chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.