List of African-American United States Cabinet Secretaries

List Of African-American United States Cabinet Secretaries

The United States Cabinet has had 17 African American appointed officers. By definition, African Americans are citizens or residents of the United States who have origins in any of the black populations of Africa. The term is generally used for Americans with at least partial Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Originally, African Americans were regarded as second-class citizens or slaves in America. No African American ever held a Cabinet position before the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and labor unions.

Robert C. Weaver became the first African-American to hold a Cabinet-level position when he was appointed United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 1966 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1975, Secretary of Transportation William Thaddeus Coleman, Jr. became the first Republican African American appointed to the Cabinet. Patricia Roberts Harris became the first African American female cabinet member when she was appointed Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 1977. In 1979, Harris became the first African American to be head of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, which was split into the departments of Education and Health and Human Services in the same year. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice's appointments as Secretary of State made them the highest-ranking African Americans in the United States presidential line of succession.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has had the most African American Secretaries, with four. The departments of Health and Human Services, State, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs have each had two. The four existing departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Interior, and Treasury have not had African American Secretaries. President Bill Clinton has appointed the most African Americans to the Cabinet during his tenure, with seven.

Read more about List Of African-American United States Cabinet Secretaries:  See Also, Notes

Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, united, states and/or cabinet:

    My list of things I never pictured myself saying when I pictured myself as a parent has grown over the years.
    Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)

    I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
    Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

    The United States is not a nation to which peace is a necessity.
    Grover Cleveland (1837–1908)

    I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our sufferings and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world—so that the moment of intense turning seems still and universal—all are here, in a music like the music of our time, like the hero and like the anonymous forgotten; and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.
    Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)

    Fences, unlike punishments, clearly mark out the perimeters of any specified territory. Young children learn where it is permissible to play, because their backyard fence plainly outlines the safe area. They learn about the invisible fence that surrounds the stove, and that Grandma has an invisible barrier around her cabinet of antique teacups.
    Jeanne Elium (20th century)