In November 1978, Mickey Leland of Texas won election
to the U.S. House of Representatives to replace Houston’s
pathbreaking Congresswoman, Barbara Jordan, who had
decided to retire. Inspired by an extended stay on the
African continent, Leland poured his energy into seeking
solutions to a disastrous famine in East Africa and raising
funds for relief efforts. Leland worked tirelessly as chair
of the House Select Committee on Hunger, which he had
lobbied Congress to create. Responding to critics who
felt he should focus on domestic poverty first, Leland
replied, “I am as much of a citizen of this world as I am
of this country. To hell with those people who are critical
of what I am able to do to help save people’s lives. I don’t
mean to sound hokey, but I grew up on the Christian
ethic which says we are supposed to help the least of our
brothers.” Leland ultimately gave his life to the cause. In
1989, he died in a plane crash while on a humanitarian
mission to transport supplies to an Ethiopian refugee camp.1
George Thomas “Mickey” Leland III was born in
Lubbock, Texas, on November 27, 1944, to George
Thomas Leland Jr. and Alice Leland. It was Leland’s
maternal grandfather who nicknamed him Mickey. When
Leland was young his parents separated, and he moved to Houston with his brother, Gaston, and their mom. His
mother put herself through school, became a teacher, and
later remarried. Mickey Leland graduated from Phyllis
Wheatley High School in Houston in 1963 and attended
Texas Southern University, a historically Black university
in Houston. Earning his bachelor’s degree in pharmacy in
1970, Leland worked as a clinical pharmacy instructor at
Texas Southern before taking a job as a pharmacist. He also
served with several university organizations, setting up free
clinics and other aid for low-income people in the Houston
area. In 1983, Leland married Alison Walton, a Georgetown
University Law School graduate who worked in investment
banking. In 1986, the couple celebrated the birth of their
first son, Jarrett.2
Influenced by diverse doctrines—the writings of Black
activists and the emphasis of his Roman Catholic faith
on helping the disadvantaged—Leland was active in the
civil rights movement as a student in the late 1960s, often
participating in unruly protests, and describing himself
as a “Marxist” and a “revolutionary.” His arrest while
demonstrating against police brutality in Houston proved to
be a pivotal moment in his life, persuading Leland to work
within the political system rather than against it. In 1971, Leland made his first trip to Africa. He developed a deep
affection for the continent, staying in Ethiopia, Kenya, and
Tanzania for three months, rather than his scheduled three
weeks. He drew inspiration from Tanzania’s first president
Julius Nyerere, a socialist and anticolonial activist who
inspired pan-Africanists around the world. “Nobody knew
where I was. . . . I got totally absorbed in Africa,” Leland
recalled. Leland was first elected to the Texas state house
of representatives in 1972 and served his diverse Houston
neighborhood from 1973 to 1979. He quickly earned a
reputation as a militant, firebrand politician in the state
legislature, appearing on the first day in a tie-dyed dashiki
shirt, an Afro haircut, and platform shoes. Leland served as
a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1972.
He also served as a delegate to the Texas state constitutional
convention in 1974, where he helped rewrite Texas’s 97-yearold
Jim Crow-era constitution, focusing on reforming the
judicial and executive branches of the state government.3
In 1978, three-term Houston Representative Barbara
Jordan announced her retirement from Congress. The
first Member to serve the newly created district, Jordan
represented central city neighborhoods where the population
was almost three-quarters minority, mostly lower- and
middle-class Black and Mexican Americans. Leland entered
the May 6 Democratic primary, garnering 48 percent of
the vote against seven other candidates. Falling short of
the necessary 50 percent to win the nomination, Leland
faced the primary runner-up, African-American candidate
Anthony Hall, in a runoff on June 3. Though Jordan
refused to endorse any one candidate, Leland’s ability to
garner support from both the district’s Black and Hispanic
constituents sealed his victory over Hall, with 57 percent of
the vote. Without official opposition in the general election,
Leland won 97 percent of the vote for the 96th Congress
(1979–1981). He was re-elected five times, typically winning
majorities of 90 percent or more.4
Upon his arrival in Washington, Leland won a seat on
the powerful Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee
(renamed the Energy and Commerce Committee in
1981)—often sought after by Members because of its
regulatory powers across a broad swath of industry. He
was also assigned to the Post Office and Civil Service
Committee, where he chaired the Subcommittee on Postal
Operations and Services. In addition, Leland served on
the Committee on the District of Columbia from the 96th
Congress until his resignation from the panel in 1985. In the 98th Congress (1983–1985), Leland served on the
Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families. In
1984, Leland convinced the House to create the Select
Committee on Hunger, a panel he chaired from its
founding until his death. Leland was an active member of
the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), which he chaired
during the 99th Congress (1985–1987).
To best serve the large Mexican-American population
in his district, Leland learned Spanish. He once surprised
his colleagues by arguing in Spanish on the House Floor in
favor of maintaining clauses in the Voting Rights Act that
required local election offices to provide voting information
in languages other than English. “Many of you cannot
understand me,” Leland said in Spanish. “And even though
you cannot understand me when I speak Spanish maybe
you can begin to understand the hypocrisy of our political
system which excludes the participation of Hispanic-Americans only for having a different culture and speaking
a different language.” His bilingualism also allowed him
to develop a controversial relationship with Cuban leader
Fidel Castro. Leland disagreed emphatically with Castro’s
political philosophy but respected his influence among
poorer nations. In 1979, Leland and Ronald V. Dellums
of California met with Castro at the Cuban Mission to the
United Nations in New York City.5
From his seat on the Energy and Commerce Committee,
Leland sought to diversify the telecommunications industry.
He took on television executives and advocated for the hiring
of more minority employees for on- and off-screen positions.
He supported the Federal Communications Commission’s
(FCC) policy to provide tax breaks to corporations that sold
broadcast stations to women and people of color, which
it adopted in 1978. In 1986, the FCC, under the Ronald
Reagan administration, ended its minority preference
programs, prompting Leland to introduce a bill to codify
the reneged policies into law. The following year, Congress
passed an appropriations bill that required the FCC to
reinstate its minority preference policy.6
Leland was an early advocate for establishing an African-American history museum in the nation’s capital. He
authored a nonbinding joint resolution expressing support
for the construction of such a museum on federal land,
which was signed into law in 1986. In 1989, he introduced
legislation alongside John Lewis of Georgia to authorize a
Black history museum within the Smithsonian Institution.
Leland’s advocacy helped pave the way for the eventual congressional approval of the National Museum of African
American History and Culture in 2003.7
Leland used his seat on the Post Office and Civil Service
Committee to shield the United States Postal Service
(USPS) from annual budget battles. With the passage of
the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970, the USPS had been
required to cover its own operating expenses. The financially
self-sufficient agency was then given “off-budget” status,
meaning that its receipts and expenditures were not included
in the federal budget or deficit, insulating it from political
influence. In the mid-1980s, the Office of Management and
Budget, under the Reagan administration, reincorporated
the USPS into the budget, making it a target for budget
cuts to help reduce the deficit. Leland sponsored a bill to
permanently separate the agency’s finances from the budget
and exempt it from budget cuts and sequestrations. The bill
passed the House and was incorporated into an omnibus
reconciliation bill in 1989. As chair of the Subcommittee on
Postal Personnel and Modernization, Leland held a series of
hearings on mail scams, particularly those that targeted the
elderly. He introduced a bill to enhance the Postal Inspection
Service’s investigatory powers to prevent fraud. A Senate
version of the bill became law in 1983.8
As chair of the CBC, Leland twice presented the caucus’s
alternative budget, which outlined its members’ priorities for
federal spending. The 1985 and 1986 CBC budgets sought to
redirect defense spending towards domestic social programs—including employment and education programs—while
raising taxes on corporations and high-income earners.
“A budget is not mearly [sic] a collection of stated ideas and
goals, but the real life choice of how our Government cares
and provides for its people,” Leland stated.9
From the beginning of his congressional career, Leland
looked abroad, focusing on international cooperation and
exchange. One of his first acts in Congress was to fund a
six-week trip to Israel to allow Black teenagers from the
Houston area to learn about Jewish culture and to create
a cross-cultural dialogue between young people in the two
countries. Leland opposed the Reagan administration’s
Cold War policies in Latin America and criticized its
efforts to block charitable organizations from providing
humanitarian aid to Nicaragua while the administration
was sending military aid to the Contras, the counterrevolutionary
rebel groups opposed to the ruling socialist
party in the Central American country. In an op-ed, Leland
wrote that hunger and suffering were “compounded when humanitarian aid is allowed to become a tool of ideology or
political strategy, instead of assessing the aid strictly on the
basis on greatest need.”10
Leland led the CBC at the height of its influence
on U.S. foreign policy. A leading voice in the call for
divestment in apartheid South Africa, Leland created
the CBC’s divestment task force and worked to identify
the names of companies doing business in South Africa.
Following the passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, Leland discovered that South
African companies continued to invest in the U.S. market
through indirect means. He introduced a bill that would
have blocked all investments by South African mining
corporations or related entities in the U.S. capital market.11
Leland spent most of his congressional career
attempting to redirect U.S. foreign policy away from the
military imperatives of the Cold War toward examining
the inequalities between rich and poor nations. When
famine struck East Africa in the early-1980s, Leland
was an outspoken advocate for alleviating hunger on the
continent. Throughout his first two terms, he lobbied
for the creation of a congressional committee to focus
on world poverty and hunger. While sympathetic to his
cause, many Members provided less support than Leland
requested, as they believed it would only add to Congress’s
bureaucracy. Leland also worked to alleviate domestic
poverty and hunger, proposing tax exemptions for American
companies that donated to food banks. In 1987, he spent
a night on a Washington, DC, steam grate to emphasize
the experience of people without housing, and he regularly
raised aid for Houston-area food banks. He also introduced
numerous bills aimed at boosting housing, food, health care,
and education assistance programs for people experiencing
homelessness. Leland often invoked two images from his
frequent trips to Ethiopian refugee camps: a throng of
starving people rubbing their stomachs and pleading for
food and an Ethiopian girl who died in his arms as he
turned to ask her caretakers about her condition. “Every
day I see her face,” Leland recalled.12
After gathering 258 cosponsors and the support of 60
national organizations, Leland realized his goal in 1984
of creating a congressional committee to examine global
hunger and poverty when his resolution passed on February
22 by a vote of 309 to 78. He was appointed the first chair
of the Select Committee on Hunger in the 98th Congress.
Modeled after the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families, the Hunger Committee studied the effects
of domestic and international hunger and poverty. In
1984, partially aided by publicity from American and
British musicians, Leland’s committee helped push through
Congress the African Famine Relief and Recovery Act,
which included $800 million in aid. The committee also
evaluated the effectiveness of the Office of Foreign Disaster
Assistance (OFDA), which coordinated federal aid to
countries experiencing natural and man-made disasters.
In a 1986 report, the committee determined that annual
appropriations made to OFDA failed to keep up with
inflation, while the number of victims of global disasters
had increased greatly since the office’s establishment in
1964. The committee report recommended doubling
OFDA’s annual appropriation from an average of $25
to $50 million, with a larger portion of the funds to be
allocated towards long-term disaster mitigation projects.
On the domestic front, the committee played a key role
in the passage of the Hunger Prevention Act of 1988,
which bolstered funding for food stamps and school meal
programs and authorized the Agriculture Department to
purchase greater amounts of agricultural commodities to
make available for food banks.13
Leland traveled frequently to Africa, often guiding
Members and their staffs to refugee camps so they could
witness firsthand how aid money was being used. On
August 7, 1989, he took advantage of the congressional
summer recess to visit a refugee camp near the Sudanese-Ethiopian border. Shortly after his plane took off from Addis
Ababa, it crashed over a mountainous region in Ethiopia
while navigating a storm. All 15 people aboard were killed,
including Leland and three congressional aides. Out of
mutual respect for Leland, the United States and Ethiopia
temporarily repaired their strained diplomatic relations, and
Ethiopian military leader Mengistu Haile Mariam allowed
American military planes to search for Leland’s downed
aircraft. The U.S. military discovered the wreckage after
seven days of searching, and a congressional delegation
accompanied Leland’s remains to Texas for burial.14
Leland was widely eulogized. Visitors poured into
his Capitol Hill office to offer their condolences. Staff
in the neighboring office occupied by Representative
George W. Crockett Jr. of Michigan helped field the
overwhelming number of phone calls. Communities
touched by Leland were quick to honor him: The CBC
renamed its humanitarian award for him in 1989, Houston International Airport named its largest terminal for him,
and the NAACP sponsored a project to plant trees in
Africa in his name. The tragedy of Leland’s death was
compounded when Alison Leland gave birth in January
1990 to premature twin sons, Cameron George and Austin
Mickey, five months after her husband’s death. Democratic
leaders in the House led a fundraiser to collect donations
for Leland’s three children. Alison Leland declined an
offer to run for her husband’s vacant House seat. With her
support, Houston-area state legislator Craig A. Washington
succeeded Leland in the December 9 special election.
Without Leland’s forceful support and leadership, the
House disbanded the Select Committee on Hunger in
the 103rd Congress (1993–1995).15
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