Former Congressman Mickey Leland of Texas

Mickey Leland spent his life on hunger, and died trying to end it

ByYvette Okafor

Photo: Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

George Thomas Leland, known as Mickey, was born in 1944 in Lubbock and grew up in Houston’s Fifth Ward. He studied pharmacy at Texas Southern University and became active in civil rights work in the 1960s.

In 1972 he was elected to the Texas House, where he pushed for health care access for poor communities. In 1978, he won the congressional seat that Barbara Jordan had held.

The hunger committee

In Congress, Leland focused on hunger at home and abroad. He helped create the House Select Committee on Hunger in 1984 and became its first chairman. He traveled to famine areas in Ethiopia and Sudan and pushed for food aid.

He also worked on homelessness, public health and the rights of minorities, and he chaired the Congressional Black Caucus.

The crash

In August 1989, Leland was flying to a refugee camp in Ethiopia when his plane crashed in the mountains. All aboard were killed.

Remembered

The international terminal at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport is named the Mickey Leland International Terminal. A statue of him stands in Houston, and the Mickey Leland National Urban Air Toxics Research Center and the Congressional Hunger Center’s Leland fellowship carry on work in his name.

His death, at age 44, cut short a career that many expected to go much further.

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