(1924–85). American lawyer, educator, and diplomat Patricia Roberts Harris was a dynamic civil rights activist. She was the first African American woman to hold a presidential cabinet post and to serve as a United States ambassador.
Harris was born Patricia Roberts on May 31, 1924, in Mattoon, Illinois. She grew up in Mattoon and Chicago, Illinois. Harris graduated from Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1945, pursued graduate studies for two years at the University of Chicago, and from 1946 to 1949 was a program director for the Young Women’s Christian Association in Chicago. In 1949 she returned to Washington, D.C., where she did further graduate work at American University and worked as assistant director of the American Council on Human Rights (1949–53). For six years thereafter she was executive director of the national headquarters of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. In 1960 she graduated from the law school at George Washington University and was admitted to the District of Columbia bar.
After a year in the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, Harris became associate dean of students and lecturer in law at Howard University. During 1962–65 she worked with the National Capital Area Civil Liberties Union. Although she left her administrative post at Howard in 1963, she remained on the Howard faculty. In 1963 Harris was named cochair, with Mildred McAfee Horton, of the National Women’s Committee for Civil Rights.
Harris became a political figure in 1965 when U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed her ambassador to Luxembourg, a post she held until 1967. She rejoined the Howard law faculty from 1967 to 1969. Harris practiced corporate law at a prestigious firm in Washington, D.C., from 1970 to 1977, when President Jimmy Carter appointed her secretary of housing and urban development. Two years later she was named secretary of health, education, and welfare; she continued in the post after the department was renamed health and human services.
In 1981 Harris returned to George Washington University as a full-time professor of law, and in 1982 she made an unsuccessful bid for mayor of Washington, D.C. Harris died on March 23, 1985, in Washington, D.C.