By: Marc H. Morial
President and CEO
National Urban League
The African-American community, especially black-owned business, 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 up 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 of 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, the first black to do so. He, however, was
forced 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
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