Mickey Leland

George Thomas "Mickey" Leland was born on the twenty-seventh of November 1944 at Lubbock, Texas, the son of Allie Joyce Williams — a primary-school teacher of mixed African and Creek descent — and Alice Rains Leland. His parents separated before his birth. He was raised by his mother at the Fifth Ward district of Houston. He attended the Phillis Wheatley High School in Houston and graduated in 1964.

He completed the bachelor's of pharmacy at Texas Southern University in 1970. He worked through his early twenties as a community pharmacist at the Fifth Ward of Houston and was active in the Houston organising of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Mexican-American Youth Organization, and the new National Welfare Rights Organization. He was elected to the Texas State House of Representatives in November 1972 from the Houston Eighty-Eighth Legislative District at twenty-seven.

He served three terms in the Texas legislature from 1973 to 1979 and was the principal author of the 1975 Texas Generic Drug Substitution Act — the first state pharmaceutical-policy legislation in the United States to require pharmacists to dispense lower-cost generic medications in lieu of brand-name prescriptions.

He stood for the United States House of Representatives in November 1978 from the new Texas Eighteenth Congressional District — the seat redistricted under the 1965 Voting Rights Act to produce the first majority-Black congressional district in Texas — and won the Democratic primary against Barbara Jordan's (placed in this archive) chief of staff Anthony Hall. He took office on the third of January 1979.

He served six consecutive terms across ten years from 1979 to 1989. He chaired the Congressional Black Caucus from 1985 to 1987. His decisive committee assignment was the founding in 1984 and chairmanship of the House Select Committee on Hunger — the principal congressional committee on American and international food-security policy. The Committee under his chairmanship across the next five years produced the foundational legislative framework for federal famine-relief funding, including the Hunger Prevention Act of 1988.

He led twelve congressional famine-relief delegations to Africa across his House tenure. He was killed on the seventh of August 1989 — on the thirteenth such delegation — when the chartered Twin Otter aircraft he was travelling on crashed into a mountain in poor weather near Fugnido, Ethiopia. He was forty-four. The principal federal famine-relief programme of the United States, the Mickey Leland International Hunger Fellows Program, was created by Congress in 2001 in his honour.

He is honored here as the chair of the Select Committee on Hunger.