Charles Rangel

Charles Bernard Rangel was born on the eleventh of June 1930 at Harlem, New York, the second of three children of Ralph Rangel — a Puerto Rican migrant who left the household when Charles was six — and Blanche Wharton Rangel, a homemaker from Accomac, Virginia. He was raised by his mother and his maternal grandfather Charles Wharton, a Harlem elevator operator. He attended the De Witt Clinton High School in the Bronx and dropped out in his junior year in 1948.

He was drafted into the United States Army in 1948 and served four years in the Korean theatre with the all-Black 503rd Field Artillery Battalion at the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division. He earned the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star for action at Kunu-ri in November 1950 — when he led forty surviving men of a three-hundred-man unit through Chinese encirclement at the Battle of Kunu-ri. He returned to New York on his discharge in 1952 at twenty-two.

He completed the high-school diploma by night school in 1953, the bachelor's at New York University in 1957 and the LL.B. at St. John's University School of Law in 1960. He entered private legal practice at Harlem and was elected to the New York State Assembly in 1966.

He stood for the United States House of Representatives in November 1970 from the New York Eighteenth Congressional District — the Harlem district then held by Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (placed in this archive) — and won the Democratic primary against Powell by 203 votes. He took office on the third of January 1971 and served the following twenty-three consecutive terms across forty-six years until his retirement in January 2017.

He was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus and served as chair of the Caucus from 1974 to 1975. He served as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee from 2007 to 2010 — the first African American to chair the principal tax-and-trade committee of the United States Congress. His decisive legislative achievement was the federal Empowerment Zone programme of 1993 — the urban-investment tax credit programme that directed approximately twenty billion dollars to forty-two American cities.

He was censured by the House in December 2010 on charges of tax and ethics violations relating to a Dominican Republic vacation property and to congressional-staff fundraising practices.

He died at New York on the twenty-sixth of May 2024, at ninety-four.

He is honored here as the dean of the Harlem congressional delegation.