Parren Mitchell

Parren James Mitchell was born on the eleventh of April 1922 at Baltimore, the youngest of ten children of Clarence Maurice Mitchell Sr. — a waiter at the Belvedere Hotel — and Elsie Davis Mitchell. The Mitchell family was the most established Black professional household of mid-century Baltimore. His older brother Clarence Mitchell Jr. — who would across the 1960s and 1970s serve as the chief Washington lobbyist of the NAACP — was nine years his senior. He was educated at the Frederick Douglass High School at Baltimore.

He served as a captain in the United States Army in the Italian campaign from 1942 to 1946 and received the Purple Heart for wounds received at Anzio. He completed the bachelor's at Morgan State College in 1950 and entered the University of Maryland at College Park for a master's degree in sociology — making him the first African American admitted to the graduate programme there. He completed the master's in 1952.

He held a succession of social-work and academic posts in Baltimore from 1952 to 1965 and served from 1965 to 1968 as the executive director of the Baltimore Community Action Agency under the federal War on Poverty programmes. He stood for the United States House of Representatives in November 1970 from the Maryland Seventh Congressional District and won — the first African American congressman from Maryland.

He served eight consecutive terms across sixteen years from 1971 to 1987. His decisive legislative achievement was the introduction in 1976 — and its inclusion in the Public Works Employment Act of 1977 — of the federal minority-business set-aside requirement. The provision required that ten percent of federal public-works contracting be reserved for minority-owned firms. The principle was sustained by the Supreme Court in Fullilove v. Klutznick of 1980 and remained the foundational structure of federal minority-business contracting for the following two decades.

He chaired the House Small Business Committee from 1981 to 1987 and the Subcommittee on Minority Enterprise and General Oversight from 1975. He retired from the House in January 1987.

He died of complications of pneumonia at Baltimore on the twenty-eighth of May 2007, at eighty-five.

He is honored here as the congressional architect of the federal minority-business set-aside.