Profile

As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Congressman Mfume was active with an array of substantive committees. He served on the Banking and Financial Services Committee where he held the ranking seat on the General Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. He also served as a member of the Committee on Education and helped to impact commerce and industry matters as a senior member of the Small Business Committee. While in his third term, he was chosen by the Speaker of the House to serve on the bipartisan Ethics Committee and by the start of his fifth term he was elected Chairman of the Joint Economic Committee of the House and Senate.

Congressman Mfume consistently advocated for landmark business and civil rights legislation. He successfully cosponsored and helped to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act, strengthened the Equal Credit Opportunity Law, and co-authored and successfully amended the Civil Rights Bill of 1991 to apply its provisions to U.S. citizens working for American-based companies abroad. He also sponsored legislative initiatives banning assault weapons and establishing stalking as a federal crime.

Congressman Mfume served as both Vice-Chair and later Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus. He was regularly designated to preside as Speaker Pro Tempore of the House of Representatives. During his fifth term in office, he was elected by the Democratic Caucus to the leadership role as Vice-Chairman for Communications – a role with broad reach and exposure.

Kweisi Mfume left his Congressional seat to become President and Chief Executive Officer of the NAACP in February of 1996 after being unanimously elected to the post and served there for nine years. During that time, he significantly raised the national profile of the NAACP while helping to restore its prominence among the nation’s oldest civil rights organizations.

His efforts to increase the organization’s relevance included pursuing enhanced civil rights enforcement measures within government and in the private sector, economic empowerment for all people, educational excellence and access to affordable healthcare in the most overlooked communities, and establishing 75 new college-based NAACP chapters across the nation. He developed the first ever grading process for economic scorecards of the nation’s industries, corporations, banks, airlines and commercial retail chains to bring about greater employment opportunities or face economic boycotts.

In 2000 as NAACP President, he worked in solidarity with Latino, Asian and Native American organizations to negotiate, develop, author and sign the first ever “Network Television Diversity Agreements” with NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox. In 2003, he negotiated for and successfully secured the NAACP’s official United Nations’ Status as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) within that world body with all of the rights and privileges thereto and pertaining.

Mfume was an original member of the Continuity of Government Commission established by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The Commission was created to study and recommend reforms related to Presidential and Congressional succession in a time of national catastrophic crisis or in the event of a terrorist attack.

He is formerly a member of the Board of Visitors of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis; People for the American Way; the Meyerhof Scholars Advisory Board of the University of Maryland; the Senior Advisory Committee of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; the African American Advisory Board of PepsiCo; the American Society of Association Executives; the National Advisory Council of Boy Scouts of America; and Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Central Maryland.

In 2010, he completed 12 years of service as a member of the Johns Hopkins University Board of Trustees and has been previously named “Marylander of the Year” by both the Baltimore Sun newspaper and Maryland Magazine. In that same year he was hired as Executive Director of the National Medical Association (NMA), which was founded in 1895 as the nation’s oldest African American Medical Association promoting the collective interests of physicians and patients throughout the U.S. Later in 2011 he was appointed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services as a member on the National Advisory Council of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) at the National Institutes of Health. He concluded his four-year term of federal service to the NIH in 2014.

From 2013 to 2018, Mfume led an NIH funded team of researchers in developing ways to close the gaps between science and health disparity policies as the Managing Director and Principal Investigator for the Health Policy Research Consortium in Maryland. He also served concurrently as Chief Health Equity Officer and a member of the Board for CTIS Health Information Systems in Rockville, Maryland. From 2011 until 2020 he functioned as a member of the Board of Research America, the nation’s largest medical and health advocacy alliance and from 2016 to 2020 served as its Vice Chairman.

Mfume was sworn in as a member of the 116th Congress on May 5, 2020, after winning a special election to fill the remainder of the term vacated by the death of his friend of 42 years (and successor in Congress) Congressman Elijah Cummings. Mfume subsequently won election to a full term in the 117th Congress. So far, his congressional successes include passing legislation to address the longstanding need for diversity in clinical cancer trials by pharmaceutical companies using federal dollars (the “Henrietta Lacks Enhancing Cancer Research Act”), codified and tripled the budget of the only federal agency tasked with promoting the growth and competitiveness of minority-owned businesses (the Minority Business Development Agency), brought back billions of dollars in COVID-19 relief money to his Maryland District, and helped countless constituents with his constituent services efforts.

He serves as a Subcommittee Ranking Member on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and the House Committee on Small Business. In 2023, the Democratic House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries appointed Mfume to serve on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. He is also a member of various caucuses, most notably the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Caucus, and the Congressional Labor Caucus.