Baltimore – Parren J. Mitchell, a Baltimore civil rights activist who became Maryland’s first black member of Congress in 1970, died Monday of complications from pneumonia at Greater Baltimore Medical Center. Mitchell, 85, had been living in a nursing home since a series of strokes several years ago.
A former head of the Congressional Black Caucus and chairman of the House Small Business Committee, Mitchell worked for years to assure minority participation in contracts let under federal public works programs. He was an original sponsor of legislation approved in 1977 guaranteeing minority contractors a share in public-works spending.
He also sponsored an amendment to the 1982 Surface Transportation Assistance Act requiring that at least 10 percent of the funds provided under the law should go to small businesses owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged people.
He considered these and related economic measures the second phase of the civil rights movement.
A trim 5- foot-5, he was known as “the Little General” during his tenure as chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, a tribute to his ability to organize his forces quickly.
During the Carter administration, he urged the government to oppose South Africa’s apartheid regime. In 1985, Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that it was Mitchell’s impassioned plea for sanctions against South Africa that persuaded him to accept a tougher measure than the Senate originally backed.
During the 1980 presidential campaign, Mitchell called Ronald Reagan a “clear and present danger to black Americans.” Two years later, he blamed President Reagan for rising unemployment.
After two nights watching “Roots,” the 1977 television miniseries tracing author Alex Haley’s family from slavery to freedom, he angrily turned off the TV. “If I had met any of my white friends, I would have lashed out at them for a vortex of primeval emotion,” he said.
“Parren’s emotion is the emotion of a Patrick Henry. He didn’t say give me liberty later,” his sister-in-law, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, told The Washington Post in 1977. “Parren is just one of God’s angry men.”
Mitchell received an undergraduate degree from Morgan State University in 1950 and applied for admission to graduate school at the University of Maryland in College Park. The university president turned him down, ruling that it was “inadvisable” for blacks to attend the College Park campus. He proposed that Mitchell attend a separate graduate program in Baltimore.
Mitchell sued and won, thus becoming the first African- American graduate student at College Park.
