Two for One Deal

"I have, you know, done a few things in my life," said Patricia Roberts Harris, when critics complained of her lack of credentials for the job to which Jimmy Carter named her last week: Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Hers was quite an understatement. A black Washington lawyer, she knows the worlds of business, academe and government. Moreover, by appointing her, Carter got a kind of "twofer": as a black and as a woman, she is proof that the President-elect is trying to open his Cabinet to both groups.

Harris, 52, was raised in Mattoon, Ill. Her father was a railroad dining-car waiter, her mother a schoolteacher. She graduated summa cum laude from Howard University in 1945. Moving to Washington in 1949, she later married William Beasley Harris, now an administrative-law judge for the Federal Maritime Commission (they have no children). With her husband's encouragement, she completed George Washington University Law School in 1960. She was first in her class.

Joining the Howard Law faculty, Harris increasingly devoted her energies to Democratic politics. At the 1964 convention she seconded Lyndon Johnson's nomination; later she served him as the nation's first black female ambassador--to Luxembourg. By 1970 she was a partner in a blue-chip Washington law firm. Along the way, Harris also broke onto the billion-dollar boards of IBM, Scott Paper and Chase Manhattan.

Self-assured, even intimidating, Harris won a reputation as a no-nonsense administrator. In 1969 she resigned after one month as dean of Howard's School of Law, protesting the university's leniency to student demands. When one student insisted on a male replacement, she told him coldly: "I didn't stop being the white man's nigger to become a black man's nigger."

Of her new job, she says: "People with no shelter need to be assured of a coherent, consistent housing policy on which they can rely." One thing she will scrutinize: highway building that cuts through urban areas and destroys neighborhoods--or, as she puts it dramatically, projects that have "opened the main artery to the city's life."

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