Patricia Roberts Harris
Patricia Roberts Harris served in the American administration of President Jimmy Carter as United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare . She was the first African American woman to serve in the United States Cabinet, and the first to enter the line of succession to the Presidency. She previously served as United States Ambassador to Luxembourg under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and was the first AfricanAmerican woman to represent the United States as an ambassador.
Roberts was born on May 31, 1924, in Mattoon, Illinois, the daughter of railroad dining car waiter Bert Fitzgerald Roberts and Hildren Brodie . She graduated summa cum laude from Howard University in 1945. While at Howard, she was elected Phi Beta Kappa and served as Vice Chairman of the Howard University chapter of the NAACP. During this time she participated in one of the nations first lunch counter sitins in 1943. There she met William Beasley Harris, a member of the Howard law faculty they were married on September 1, 1955. She did postgraduate work in industrial relations at the University of Chicago from 1946 to 1949 and at American University in 1949.
Source: Wikipedia