Robert C. Weaver (1907-1997) was a housing expert who served as administrator of the Housing and Home Finance Agency and then became the first African American cabinet officer when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1966.

Born into a middle-class family in 1907, Robert C. Weaver grew up in a nearly all-white Washington, D.C. neighborhood. The grandson of Robert Tanner Freeman, the first African American, Harvard-educated dentist, Weaver followed his grandfather's footsteps and enrolled at Harvard after graduation from Dunbar High School. At Harvard he majored in economics and graduated cum laude in 1929. Two years later he received a master's from Harvard. After teaching economics one year at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, Weaver returned to Harvard in 1932 on a scholarship and pursued a Ph.D. in economics conferred in 1934.

Deeply concerned that African Americans receive...