A Man of Commitment

Rep. Mickey Leland (D-Tex.) traveled to Ethiopia seven times. The first of the visits to remote refugee camps was made long before hunger in Africa became an international issue; the last, long after the issue faded from the headlines and the evening news. The last trip ended as Leland and 15 other passengers died when their plane flew into a cliff and burned in stormy weather en route to yet another region of poverty and starvation. The site was so remote and the weather so bad that it took nearly a week of aerial search to find the plane.

A licensed pharmacist, Leland had represented a slum district of Houston since 1978, when he ran for a seat vacated by retiring Rep. Barbara Jordan. He was chairman of two major House committees and served one year as chairman of the House Black Caucus. But helping keep people in poor nations alive was his passion and his most visible leadership role was as chairman of the Select Committee on Hunger that he worked so hard to create.

The respected Almanac of American Politics recalls that Leland entered politics as a dashiki-clad militant who was “an individual, even an eccentric.” The dashiki disappeared years ago, but on the cause of hunger, the militancy did not. The torment of watching a 14-year-old Ethiopian girl die before his eyes in a refugee camp was clearly a driving force in his campaign against hunger and in his repeated trips to Ethiopia, a country he called the “end of the Earth.”