Patricia Roberts Harris served as United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and United States Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the administration of President Jimmy Carter. She was the first African American woman to serve as a United States Ambassador, representing the U.S. in Luxembourg under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the first to enter the line of succession to the Presidency. Patricia Roberts was born in Mattoon, Illinois, and was the daughter of a railroad dining car waiter. She graduated summa cum laude from Howard University in 1945. While at... Howard, she was elected Phi Beta Kappa, and she also participated in one of the nation's first lunch counter sit-ins, in 1943. There she met William Beasley Harris, a member of the Howard law faculty; they were married in 1955. She did postgraduate work at the University of Chicago and at American University in 1949. Until 1953, she worked as Assistant Director of the American Council on Human Rights.
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