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

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>Robert Clifton Weaver (December 29, 1907 – July 17, 1997) was an American economist, academic, and political administrator who served as the first United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (H.U.D.) from 1966 to 1968, when the department was newly established by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Weaver was the first African American to be appointed to a US cabinet-level position.</p>

<p>Prior to his appointment as cabinet officer, Weaver had served in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. In addition, he had served in New York State government, and in high-level positions in New York City. During the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, he was one of 45 prominent African Americans appointed to positions and helped make up the Black Cabinet, an informal group of African-American public policy advisers. Weaver directed federal programs during the administration of the New Deal, at the same time completing his doctorate in economics in 1934 at Harvard University.</p>

<p>Robert Clifton Weaver was born on December 29, 1907, into a middle-class family in Washington, D.C. His parents were Mortimer Grover Weaver, a postal worker, and Florence (Freeman) Weaver. They encouraged him in his academic studies. His maternal grandfather was Dr. Robert Tanner Freeman, the first African American to graduate from Harvard in dentistry.</p>

<p>Robert C. Weaver was a noted economist and administrator. From 1966 through 1968, he was the first African American cabinet official, serving as the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Weaver was born December 29, 1907 in Washington D.C. and raised in that city.</p>

<p>From 1929 through 1934, he attended Harvard University, earning economic degrees at the Bachelor of Science, Masters’, and Ph.D. levels. As an administrator, Weaver worked as an adviser to the Secretary of the Interior (1933-37), special assistant for the Housing Authority (1937-40), and an administrative assistant with the National Defense Advisory Commission (1940). During the Second World War, he worked in several capacities concerned with mobilizing black labor into industrial employment contracted by the federal government.</p>

<p>In the immediate postwar period, Weaver held several successive positions with the federal government. His most noted positions were serving as the Department of the Interior’s first Black adviser on racial problems and Chicago, Illinois’s executive director of the Mayor’s Committee on Race Relations. Simultaneously, Weaver taught at several universities, wrote two books, and directed the fellowship department at the John Hay Whitney Foundation (1949-1955). Thereafter, he became a member of New York State’s governor’s cabinet as its rent commissioner (1955-1959). Weaver also joined Sigma Pi Phi fraternity.</p>