Parren J. Mitchell, the first African-American elected to Congress from Maryland and a lifelong crusader for social justice for the nation's minorities, died yesterday of complications from pneumonia at Greater Baltimore Medical Center.
He was 85 and had lived in a nursing home since a series of strokes several years ago.
A founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus and later its chairman, Mr. Mitchell was the younger brother of Clarence M. Mitchell Jr., Washington lobbyist for the NAACP in the hard-won civil rights struggles in Congress of the 1960s and 1970s.
He and other members of the family, including his brother and sister-in-law, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, the longtime matriarch of Baltimore's civil rights movement, played important roles in social causes and held city and state offices.
"The Mitchell family is to social justice what the Rockefellers are to money," the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson said when Clarence Mitchell died in 1984.
Parren Mitchell was elected in 1970 to the first of his eight terms in Congress from the 7th District, after holding posts in the administrations of Baltimore Mayors Theodore R. McKeldin and Thomas J. D'Alesandro III, and Gov. J. Millard Tawes.
In his 16 years representing his Baltimore district, he tried to ensure that black-owned businesses got their share of tax money spent on public works projects and called attention to what he considered instances of prejudice, such as alleged job bias on the Baltimore waterfront and promotion practices at Social Security Administration headquarters in Woodlawn.
In the 1970s, he fought for legislation requiring local jurisdictions to set aside 10 percent of federal grants to hire minority contractors. In 1982, he attached a similar amendment to a multimillion-dollar highway bill.
It was part of a strategy he later characterized as the second phase of the civil rights movement, economic empowerment.
An avowed liberal, he was one of the first to advocate impeaching President Richard M. Nixon.
In the 1980s, he was an uncompromising opponent of the "supply side" economics promoted by President Ronald Reagan, calling such strategies "fiscal savagery against the poor."
"I am absolutely devastated," said Kweisi Mfume, former head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "It is the same feeling I got when I learned my father died. He was like a second father to me. He sort of saved my life."
