Weaver, Robert C. (Robert Clifton), 1907-1997

Economist, public administrator, educator, and author. United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Robert Clifton Weaver was born on December 29, 1907, in Washington, D.C. Weaver received his B.A. and Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. Throughout the New Deal era, Weaver served as an advisor on minority affairs in a number of federal agencies. He remained an active participant in efforts to improve race relations throughout the mid-1940s. Following the Second World War, Weaver was a professor at Northwestern, Columbia, and New York Universities from 1947 until 1951. Between 1949 and 1955, he also worked for the John Hay Whitney Foundation, overseeing the opportunity fellowship program. In the late 1950s, Weaver was New York state's rent commissioner. Then, in 1960, he became vice chairman of the New York City Housing and Redevelopment Board. President-elect Kennedy asked Weaver to serve as the administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA). In that capacity, Weaver helped author the 1961 compilation housing bill. He also supported and helped lobby for the 1962 Senior Citizens Housing Act. Weaver continued working at HHFA during the Johnson administration, drafting all of the administration's housing and urban renewal programs. Weaver also worked on the $7.8 billion housing bill in 1965, which included an expansion of public housing and programs for rent supplementing low-income families. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was created in September 1965, and Weaver became its first secretary the following January -- thereby becoming the first African-American appointed to a cabinet position. HUD absorbed HHFA, so many of Weaver's responsibilities carried over from his former post. After assuming the responsibilities as HUD secretary, Weaver promoted the Metropolitan Development Act in November of 1966 and the Demonstration Cities Program. Weaver was an opponent to suggestions opposing the promotion of homeownership among the poor, believing that the poor could not meet the demands of paying a mortgage or keeping up a home; instead, he supported expanding funding for existing housing programs. Still, Weaver was a proponent of the Johnson administration's open housing bill, believing it would help the nation's policy against discrimination. He ran into problems in 1966 when Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff and Senator Robert F. Kennedy criticized his federal urban renewal efforts. Despite the success of individual programs, Weaver's initiatives had failed to stop the growth of urban decay. Weaver resigned his post on January 1, 1969. Later that year, he became president of Bernard Baruch College, but he left that post in 1971 to become professor of urban affairs at Hunter College. Robert Weaver died in New York City on July 17, 1997.

Member, International Fraternity of Lambda Alpha, New York Chapter.

Robert Clifton Weaver was an economist, public administrator, educatorand author.

Born in Washington, D.C., he was educated at Harvard University, where he received three degrees, including the Ph.D. in 1934. He was successively advisor to the Secretary of the Interior (1933-1937), special assistant with the U.S. Housing Commission (1937-1940), and, during World War II he held several offices concerned with mobilizing black labor. During the 1930's through 1940 Weaver was a core member of President Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet."

An economist, Weaver believed the key to racial equality was economic opportunity, particularly in the areas of jobs and housing. He focusedhis career and writings in these areas, publishing two books, "Negro Labor, A National Problem" (1946) and "The Negro Ghetto" (1948). From 1949 to 1955 Weaver directed the fellowship program of the John Hay Whitney Foundation, after which he became rent commissioner in New York State (1955-1959), and as such a memberof the Governor's Cabinet. He was active in the civil rights movement and served for a year as national chairman of the board of directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1959-1960).

In 1961 President John F. Kennedy appointed Weaver to head the federal Housing and Home Financing Agency. And, in 1966 President Lyndon B. Johnson named Weaver the secretary of newly created Department of Housingand Urban Development (HUD), thus giving him the distinction of being the first African American to serve in the Cabinet. In this role he developed many innovative solutions to urban redevelopment.

Weaver left the government in 1969 to become president of Bernard Baruch College of the City University of New York, and from 1970-1978 was professor of urban affairs at Hunter College. His other publications include "The Urban Complex" (1964) and "Dilemmas of Urban America" (1965) regarding urban problems and urban renewal. He died in 1997 in New York City.

Robert Clifton Weaver, the first black presidential cabinet officer, served as the first Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Lyndon Baines Johnson. However, this represented only one of a series of important posts in federal, state and municipal governments as well as private foundations, organizations and universities held by Weaver during his long and illustrious career. As economist, public administrator, educator and author, Weaver devoted himself to the multifaceted issues of minority labor and urban problems.

In 1933, Weaver was one of a number of young men drawn to Washington by the New Deal administration, where he received a succession of assignments as adviser on minority problems to various agency administrators. He soon became the leader of “The Black Cabinet” whose efforts resulted in increased participation by and benefit to minority groups in the numerous projects and programs sponsored by the government during this period. His associates in this group included Ralph Bunche (United Nations Undersecretary General), U.S. Court of Appeals Judge William H. Hastie and N.A.A.C.P. Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins. While in the federal service, Weaver also supervised the National Survey of Negro White Collar and Skilled Workers sponsored by the Department of the Interior and served as a consultant both to the T.V.A. and to President Franklin Roosevelt's Advisory Committee on Education.

After World War II, Weaver left the federal government to teach and write on the problems of urban living. His research resulted in numerous articles as well as the following monographs: Negro Labor (1946), The Negro Ghetto (1948), and The Urban Complex (1964).

In 1961, Weaver returned to Washington when President Kennedy appointed him Director of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, which later became the Department of Housing and Urban Development (H.U.D.). There Weaver tried to stimulate a more aesthetic environment in public housing and to improve relocation policies by increasing funds available to small businessmen displaced by urban renewal. He ensured that the Housing Act of 1961 included grants for recreational and scenic areas and pushed through the controversial Section 221d3, giving non-profit corporations cut-rate mortgage loans to provide housing for displaced families of low and moderate income.

Weaver was born and raised in Washington, D.C. His father, Mortimer Grover Weaver was a U.S. postal clerk. Weaver's maternal grandfather, Dr. Robert Tanner Freeman, the first black in the United States to earn a doctoral degree in dentistry, graduated from Harvard's dental school with its first class in 1869. Both Weaver and his brother, Mortimer, attended Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C. where Weaver had his own electrical business during his senior year. Mortimer Weaver, who graduated from Williams College and Harvard University, was an assistant professor of English at Howard University at the time of his death in 1929 at the age of twenty-three.

Robert Weaver was a Distinguished Professor of Urban Affairs and Director of Urban Research Center at Hunter College. He was also a member of the New York City's Municipal Assistance Corporation, the Rent Stabilization Board, and the Conciliation and Appeals Board of New York City, and has received numerous citations and honorary degrees.

For more detailed information on Weaver's life and career, see Chronology.