Marc H. Morial

The African American community, especially black-owned business, recently lost a major ally in Parren Mitchell, the former Maryland congressman who was instrumental in pushing through legislation requiring 10 percent of government contracts to go to minority firms.

The so-called “10 percent set-aside” helped open the door for countless black businesses to the government contracting world, which until then had been largely elusive to minorities.

Late last month, Mitchell, who led the U.S. House Small Business Committee and was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, succumbed at the age of 85 to complications from pneumonia.

The son of a waiter and a homemaker, he served in the U.S. Army during World War II, earning a Purple Heart after being wounded in Italy. He left the military to earn a bachelor’s degree from Morgan State University, and then a master’s in sociology from the University of Maryland at College Park, where he was the first black to do so. (He was forced, however, to sue the university to gain admission to its graduate school.)

Mitchell was part of the famous “Goon Squad,” a group of civil rights activists in Baltimore from the church, education and other professions dedicated to ending segregation and ensuring equality of blacks in a largely African American city.

“At that time, you couldn’t get a hamburger in a greasy spoon,” observed Homer Favor, a fellow member of the group, to the Baltimore Times.

Mitchell cut his teeth under the administrations of two Baltimore mayors, Theodore R. McKeldin and Thomas J. D’Alesandro III, and one Maryland governor, J. Millard Tawes. From 1961 to 1965, Mitchell served as director of the Maryland Commission of Human Relations and then as head of the Baltimore Community Action Agency for three years.

After an unsuccessful congressional bid in 1967, he won election to represent Maryland’s 7th District three years later. From 1971 to 1987, Mitchell championed affirmative action and used his Small Business Committee chairmanship to help minorities break the color barrier in the corporate world.

His older brother, the late Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., headed the NAACP’s Washington office and served as a key advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson on civil rights issues. His brother’s wife, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, was the first black female lawyer in Maryland and advised three presidents. Together, the Mitchell brothers were considered the black Kennedys because of their tireless devotion to public service.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, who now holds the seat Mitchell once held, eulogized him as a remarkable man who engendered respect by “constantly building bridges … while tearing down the walls that had excluded them,” the Associated Press reported in a recent story.

According to the Baltimore Times, Cummings described Mitchell as “a true servant leader, never concerning himself about fame or fortune but, rather, devoting himself entirely to uplifting the people he represented.”

In a recent column, USA Today’s DeWayne Wickham, who was a young father struggling to support his family when he worked in Mitchell’s office in the early 1970s, remembered his former boss for his personal acts of heroism as well as his public service.

“Heroes can be measured in ways large and small. They can be gauged by the achievements gained in a life of public service — by the deeds done under the scrutiny that comes to those who chose to live their lives in a political fishbowl. By this yardstick, Mitchell was a remarkable man,” Wickham observed.

“But while it is harder to chronicle, heroes can also be found among those whose humanitarian acts are rendered beyond the prying eyes of television cameras, or the probing questions of newspaper reporters. It is this way that I and many others came to know him … I’ll remember him as a man who stood tall with presidents, but stooped low to teach a young father and budding journalist the power of words — and the importance of conviction,” he wrote.

Since Parren Mitchell first joined together with his fellow “Goon Squad” members to fight injustice in his hometown of Baltimore, much has changed there and elsewhere. Now, not only do African Americans have the right to freely eat at their local greasy spoon, they have the right to own it, if they so desire.

Even so, as Mitchell observed, the struggle for equality is ongoing today and far from over.

“There’s no getting off that train. You can’t say, ‘I’ve put five years in fighting racism and now I’m finished.’ No, you are not finished. Our job is to fight it every day, to continue to shove it down and when it rises up to shove it down even harder,” Mitchell said in a 1989 speech before the Baltimore teachers union, according to a recent Associated Press story.

Mitchell put a foot in the door for African Americans in the world of government contracting and business. Now it’s the African American community’s turn to take advantage of the opportunities he secured to show that his sacrifices weren’t made in vain.

Marc H. Morial is the president and CEO of the National Urban League.