Patricia Roberts Harris

Patricia Roberts was born on the thirty-first of May 1924 at Mattoon, Illinois, the elder of two daughters of Bert Fitzgerald Roberts — a Pullman porter on the Illinois Central Railroad — and Hildren Brodie Johnson Roberts, a homemaker who completed the eighth grade. Her father left the household when she was six. She and her sister were raised by their mother across the difficult Depression years of the Illinois prairie towns. She graduated valedictorian of the Englewood High School in Chicago in 1941 and took the bachelor's summa cum laude in 1945 at Howard University.

She worked from 1945 to 1953 as a program director for the YWCA in Chicago and as an administrative assistant for the American Council on Human Rights, completed graduate work at the University of Chicago, and joined the Department of Justice as a trial attorney in 1953. She married the attorney William Beasley Harris in 1955 and entered the George Washington University National Law Center in 1957, completing the J.D. in 1960 at the top of her class.

She served from 1960 as associate dean of students and law lecturer at Howard. President John Kennedy appointed her in 1962 as co-chair of the National Women's Committee for Civil Rights. President Lyndon Johnson appointed her in May 1965 United States Ambassador to Luxembourg — the first African American woman ambassador in American history. She served at Luxembourg from August 1965 to September 1967.

She returned to Howard in 1967 as the dean of the Howard Law School — the first woman dean of any American law school. President Jimmy Carter appointed her in January 1977 Secretary of Housing and Urban Development — making her on the twenty-third of January 1977 the first African American woman appointed to the United States Cabinet. She served at HUD until 1979 and then as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare from 1979 to 1981 — the position renamed by her recommendation Secretary of Health and Human Services on the first of May 1980.

She ran for mayor of Washington, D.C., in 1982 and lost the Democratic primary to Marion Barry. She returned to George Washington Law School as full professor in 1983.

She died of breast cancer at Washington on the twenty-third of March 1985, at sixty.

She is honored here as the first Black woman in the U.S. Cabinet.