But it is one that Leland fell into by luck of timing and a penchant for wanting to take hold of an issue and make it his. Mental preparedness earned in the civil rights struggle, the African bush and travels in Israel also helped to make him an able leader on an issue as compelling as hunger.

Leland’s myriad of experiences have instilled in him a world view that realizes, but goes beyond, national and color boundaries. It’s a philosophy influenced by Julius K. Neyere, former president of Tanzania, and one that some say gives him the skills needed to keep the hunger issue alive in Congress. While most American voters are unaware of the committee’s existence, its impact is felt in such recent steps as passage of the 1988 Hunger Prevention Act and government efforts in March to get a ceasefire in the Sudan to allow emergency food into that war torn country.

These and many more actions in which the committee played a role, speak to its ongoing success in taking the concerns of hundreds of hunger advocacy groups across the country, and propelling them into government action. Often, particularly domestically, the committee’s accomplishments are low-key and of the detailed sort that would not radically end global poverty. But removing obstacles to feeding hungry people, however minor, is a necessary step, committee staff say.

For example, last year Leland pushed for a new Women, Infants and Children (WIC) test program encourage mothers to eat more fresh and vegetables. That small effort became surprisingly popular and this year $2 million was authorized for a demonstration project in 10 states that will give women between $10 and $20 per year to buy fresh fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets. That amount admittedly won’t buy much, but it’s a step in the right direction, some in the chosen states have said.

It is the nature and irony of select committees that they must walk a fine line in Congress. Since they cannot draft legislation, they must convince powerful legislative or standing committees to tackle social issues that have no organized constituencies – issues such as hunger, children or homelessness.

Select committees also must tread gingerly to avoid turf wars with legislative committees, of which at least six have jurisdiction over the hunger committee.

The powerful House Agriculture Committee is one such committee. Its Chairman, Rep E. “Kika” de la Garza, also of Texas, opposes the existence of the hunger committee. This year he opposed its reauthorization – a process that all select or, in effect, ad hoc committees must go through every two years.

“Mickey Leland does an excellent job; he delivers in substance,” de la Garza says. But he thinks the committee merely draws out an already complicated process of getting legislation through the House.

De La Garza accepts that the hunger committee gives “exposure” to issues in a manner that legislative committees do not have, but stresses that his major concern is that members of the House are already overloaded with committee responsibilities. Some committees often end up meeting with only a chairperson and one member present, de la Garza argues.

Poor attendance is something foreign to the hunger committee, however. Colleagues say Leland has managed to get his 29 committee members to the point of feeling guilty if they don’t at least show up and participate in meetings and hearings.

In discussing why the hunger committee gets little public attention, Rodney E. Leonard, editor of Community Nutrition Institute’s Nutrition Week says, “the hunger committee has to do enough to warrant support of the House but not too much to offend.”

Leonard says that with Leland at that helm, “the hunger committee keeps the House honest. Mickey tends to commit his business very assiduously. He attends hearings and gets members to attend hearings. His committee staff works very well with standing committees.”

This means holding hearings on Capitol Hill as well as in the field, and doing the kind of research that the standing committees are often busy to accomplish. It sometimes means tackling issues that standing committees are politically afraid to touch. “The thing about Mickey is – people look at committees from the perspective of ‘how it is gonna look for me.’ Because of seniority, some Congressmen are the lead persons on committees, but they are cold. Mickey – he’s really personally concerned about the issue,” says Leonard.

Gene L. Locke, a Houston attorney and longtime friend from Leland’s student activist days, echoes that assessment. “Mickey’s commitment and his principles show. He can be complimented for keeping perspective, principles and commitment balanced,” Locke says. In addition to hunger issues, Locke says. In addition to hunger issues, Locke says, Leland is “active in international issues, he has an understanding of third world politics, he’s a big time player in the Texas Democratic Party and he’s a force to contend with in the Texas community.”

“When you talk about El Salvador or Panama, he’s standing for the right things and that’s what people see in him,” Locke says.

When Leland was elected to national office for the first time in 1979, replacing retiring Barbara Jordan, he went ready to tackle health issues. He already had a respectable portfolio on these issues acquired during his three terms in the Texas legislature. Among other things, he fought successfully for passage of a bill to allow generic substitutes for prescriptions, offending pharmacy colleagues in the process. But on Capitol Hill, he found others already carrying the torch on health matters.

Relating the story during a recent interview of his foray into – and now commitment to – hunger, Leland paused and reflected thoughtfully. “If you know me and my personality, there has to be an issue that is mine, that I can pursue with all due fervor – without creating competition, if you will.

“I came to Congress to pursue health issues. I was successful. I got on the Energy and Commerce Committee. I got on the Health and Environment Subcommittee. But I found that it was very difficult to carve a niche for myself in the arena of health per se, primarily because before I’d gotten to Congress there were other people who had done just that and who thought pretty clearly the same as I did. It was very difficult for me to identify health as an issue that was mine.”

Leland, a hazel-eyed, handsome man with a quick smile, does like to lend his particular style – a style some call charismatic, others flamboyant and glitzy – to anything he tackles. He certainly behaved as his own man ruled by his own passion while in the state legislature. Colleagues recall that he often wore Nyerere (Chinese styled, high-collared) jacketed ashikis (colorful embroidered African shirts) on the floor and frequently advocated black self-pride.

“In the 60’s,” Leland says of those days, “I learned to hold on to my Africanness dearly, as many others did during that time. I was part of the movement to rename us [as] we wanted to be called as opposed to negro, coloreds or nigras.” Locke says of Leland in those days, “many people applauded him, others thought he was crazy, yet he was a man of conviction.”

Leland himself enjoys acknowledging that even his early days in Congress saw him in Nyerere jackets. He offended many, including congressional doorkeeper, who, Leland recalls laughingly, once tried to bar his entry because he appeared to be without a tie – a violation of House floor rules.

The tie was under the Nyeree suit. Hunger, both domestic and international, became the issue for Leland once he realized that no one in Congress wanted to touch it. As Arenia Edwards, a feisty, respected Houston welfare rights advocate and “second mother” to Leland reminisces, about the 1960’s integration movement, “Mickey never sat on his hands.” During student attempts to integrate lucheonettes, she says, “he was always the first one to get ketchup on his head.”

With Ronald Reagan leading a country that was in a full conservative swing, few politicians wanted to acknowledge the faces of the estimated 23 million Americans who were homeless or going to bed hungry at some point every month. No one wanted to know that many of them were children of working families, or that the number of food banks and soup kitchens was increasing rather than decreasing as advocates had hoped when they first began opening doors during the late 1970’s.

Yet, as the Food Research and Action Center, a Washington-based advocacy group notes, the facts were undeniably clear. In 1981 and 1982, drastic cutbacks in federal programs had forced a significant increase in hunger among low-income people.

By demonstrating his commitment and adeptness at building coalitions and finding the common ground, Leland took the hunger issue and made it his.

National hunger organizations often praise Leland for being able to find that common ground. That skill has kept the committee alive for three successive congressional terms, despite some House opposition.

Leland in turn praises the 300 or more advocacy groups, including Bread for the World, a Christian hunger advocacy group that not only spearheaded the public drive to create the committee but supports its reauthorization every two years.

“What’s been beautiful about the evolution of the House Select Committee on Hunger is really the support that we get from all those private voluntary organizations outside of Congress who supported us from the very beginning, helped to get us started and continue to relate to us,” says Leland. Those groups, he says, are “very powerful people – not powerful in the sense of having a lot of money, but they understand how to change members’ minds.” The hunger committee’s presence, in turn, gives these groups another forum when advocating for an expansion of federal programs.

Finding the common ground is a political as well as personal philosophy Leland has developed over the years. His staff, colleagues and others who have worked with him on hunger issues say he is able to communicate with everyone from hungry, sometimes dying children in Ethiopia to a president hard on hunger issues.

He and a group of Ethiopian children touched each other spiritually in 1984 when he got them to repeat the words “I love you.” That emotional exchange – with the congressional delegation looking on – lasted about half an hour.

Following that trip, and at a time when the Congressional Black Caucus was failing to get an audience with then-president Reagan, Leland met with him and succeeded in getting a ship headed for India diverted with food to Ethiopia.

Leland’s humanitarianism – spiced with a dash of political acumen – has enabled him to befriend Cuba’s Fidel Castro, persuade Head of State Mengistu Haile-Mariam to allow food aid into Ethiopia, and get Republicans opposed to a hunger committee to act as apostles for its creation.

The story of the 1984 Ethiopia trip is a coup that committee staff and hunger advocates love to talk about. Leland took Congressman Bill Emerson, a ranking Missouri Republican – who now vice-chairs the committee - and others to witness the devastating famine. It was an eye-opener for them. “It stunned them. They were just poleaxed,” said one hunger advocate who was on hand for the press conference called after the trip.

“When the Republicans who went on the trip saw catastrophe for the first time in their lives, that’s how some of the allies were made,” adds Miranda Katsoyanis, the hunger committee’s chief of staff.

Of that trip and Emerson’s role, Leland says, “I saw in him a very deeply committed human being, committed to helping other human beings.

Leland and Emerson are great friends today – this despite, as Leland puts it, the fact that Emerson got on the committee “tow work to its demise.” Always the politician, Leland says he had targeted Emerson for the Ethiopia trip knowing he was a key opponent.

Emerson admits he was placed on the committee as a watchdog. His opposition, however, was not to fighting hunger, but to select committees in general. “I didn’t think that Congress needed a different committee. We could do a better job if we had fewer committees,” Emerson says. “Where I have changed my opinion is that until Congress reforms its structure, the hunger committee provides a very useful oversight function.”

Before 1984, getting a hunger committee authorized was not as easy task. Congressman Benjamin A. Gilman, an upstate New York Republican, had trying to get a hunger committee approved even before Leland got to Washington.

Paul Berkowitz, a Gilman staff member, recalls that “nobody wanted to touch this committee.” But when Gilman – armed with a June 1980 report of the (Carter) Presidential Commission on World Hunger – teamed up with Leland to co-sponsor legislation, success was within sight. Yet even with that bi-partisan effort, says Leland, “Congress resisted until I was able to convince Tip O’Neill that we had to have this.”

One of the hunger committee’s major accomplishments was getting $5 million added to the foreign assistance bill for Women in Development (WID) legislation. While it was only a portion of what the hunger committee was after, members successfully got Congress to mandate that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) increase funding for projects involving women. And through the work of committee member Marge Roukema, a Republican from New Jersey, Congress began focusing on Vitamin A research to prevent blindness.

In 1986, with members such as Gilman leading the effort, the hunger committee issued a major report on micro-enterprise. Two years later it was successful in getting USAID to devote $50 million to micro-enterprise credit for small-scale, poor businesses and farmers. A $75 million earmark was successfully included in the fiscal 1989 federal budget.

Leland has on occasion gone out on a limb on legislation. He did so in 1986 when he pushed for budget-busting legislation for the homeless. With hunger committee research in hand, he sponsored the Homeless Persons Survival Act (the omnibus bill) – a $4 billion ticket item at a time of stringent Gramm-Rudman-Hollings budget philosophy.

Offering the omnibus bill before homelessness became popular was probably foolhardy, Leland reflects now. “At the same time,” he says, “I, cannot let an issue that tends to be controversial or challenge the moral integrity of Congress stop me. I have to continue to put forth idealistic legislation, and ultimately, something – maybe a window – will be opened. Maybe a step will be taken in the right direction to end the problem that we see.”

The omnibus bill, which covered mental health assistance and nutrition, and gave homeless people access to federal benefits without a fixed address, failed in the 100th Congress. But the no-cost portions of the bill got approval in 1986, and today ensure that benefits under Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid can no longer be denied because a poor person does not have a permanent address. Veterans, who make up a quarter of the homeless population today, also were covered under the provision.

Though the omnibus bill failed, Congress passed the Stewart McKinney Homeless Assistance Act last year.

Leland believes that his joining forces with the radical Mitch Snyder, leader of the Community for Creative Non-Violence, on the “Great American Sleep Out” helped the McKinney bill’s passage.

“Many Congressmen looked at us with a critical eye and said this was beneath Congress for us to go and sleep on a grate at night, but we did it anyway and we got a lot of media attention. That was right before Congress passed the McKinney bill. Had we not done it, we might not have passed that piece of legislation,” Leland says. “But American people were very impressed, so they in turn laid upon their Congress people to pass the legislation.”

Such feats frequently bring national media attention. However, they attract praise as well as criticism. Nutrition Week’s Leonard, who has monitored the hunger committee since its creation, frowns on the flamboyant aspects of Leland’s style. “Mickey has been instrumental in building the committee and maintaining its prestige…but the troubling thing about Mickey is that he tends to like glitter and glitz. It’s fine. It’s a way of securing visibility, but in terms of problems of longer term issues, glitter and glitz is not effective,” says Leonard.

If asked what strikes them as the most impressive aspect of Leland and his chairmanship of the hunger committee, colleagues and friends have similar and ready answers. They use words such as humane, sincere and consistent and say he has managed to keep partisanship to as low a level as is possible in a partisan Congress.

“Mickey Leland does not run hot and cold. While he’s seen as a progressive Democrat, one of Mickey’s strengths is he will pull people of all persuasions together,” says Dr. J. Larry Brown, a Harvard University School of Public Health Professor and Chairman of the Physician Task Force on Hunger in America.

Brown says that especially during the Reagan Administration “when government officials were trying to deny that the problem existed, Mickey and the committee provided an alternative reality.”

“Small organizations are spurred on by this committee. I can’t tell you how many times people were upset about what Reagan and Meese were saying as I traveled about the country. But when they would turn around and say ‘at least someone is doing something.”

“Mickey has a bully pulpit in the best sense of the word to keep the issue of hunger in the public eye,” Brown says.

On the international side, Dawit Wolde Giorgis, a former high-level Ethiopian government official (he defected in 1986), calls Leland a very understanding and consistent man.

Leland and Giorgis, currently a projects analyst with the Homeless Planning Unit of New Jersey’s Department of Human Services, met in Havana. The story he relates about that 1979 meeting reveals much about Leland’s broad world view and willingness to stick to his convictions.

“Mickey was trying to understand us – not reject us because of politics. Even the Mengistu understands that Leland represents America and everything it stands for – its freedom of speech – yet [Leland’s] relationship with Ethiopia is very different [from that of other politicians]. He believes in dialogue; he does not believe in confrontation.” Giorgis says. Despite leanings in Congress to economically boycott Ethiopia, Leland urged a humanitarian approach.

Leland himself often quips that he is able to talk to anyone “from Castro to Mobutu (Sese Seko of Zaire)” and he is the member of Congress closest to the Cuban leader.

He’s “been to Cuba maybe 10 or 12 times – probably more than any member of Congress ever.” He, in fact, secured the release of four CIA prisoners his first year in Congress and, he says, “vowed that despite popular opinion about Fidel Castro – about Cuba, I was going to develop that relationship.”

In 1980 after leading several trips to Cuba, Leland accomplished what he considers his greatest feat: he took 10 Republican doctors to view health achievements in Cuba, a country whose infant mortality rate is better than many parts of the United States.

Leland is still inclined to step into, rather than away from, a controversial political issue – be it blacks in telecommunications, food wars in the Sudan or apartheid in South Africa. In fact he and other black and congressional leaders were once arrested for picketing that country’s embassy. But he is sufficiently astute, he says, in knowing when to “finesse, politically, some issues – try to put a less controversial face on things. I try to adhere to the adage that there is more than one way to skin a cat.”

On domestic hunger issues, that usually means that “we have to look at what the standing committees are working on and attach something. Much of our action is the result of earmarks,” says Katsoyanis, his chief of staff.

Leland also will step back and let his committee members pursue the aspects of hunger and poverty that interest them. For example committee member Tony Hall, an Ohio Democrat who was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand, concentrates on Asian issues. The hunger committee took a fact finding tour to Vietnam and, according to committee reports, made some progress on the POW/MIA discussion.

But this foray into foreign affairs occasionally engenders criticism from some House members. Even Emerson is critical of the committee trying to become involved in hunger issues in Angola, saying that southern Africa is a politically sensitive area that should be left to the foreign affairs committee.

But the hunger committee staff says it can, and usually does justify every issue it touches including AIDS and third world hunger.

In his political as well as personal life Leland calls an unusual mix of people friends. His wife, Alison Walton Leland, a Shearson Lehman Hutton investment banker, says what amazed her about Leland when they met in 1982, “was the fact that he considers and amazing variety of people friends. From middle class blacks to wealthy whites to poor blacks to poor whites. Such an eclectic mix of people is not typical of black people our age.”

The two met in Washington, D.C., while she was a George Washington University student. She was immediately impressed, Mrs. Leland says, with her husband’s sincerity and love of children. “Everyone in Texas knew him, even little kids.”

“When he walks down the street he stops and plays with the children. They say, ‘hey, it’s Mickey Leland’ in the same way they would say, ‘hey, it’s O.J. Simpson. It’s unusual for children to know who a congressman is,” she says.

It is Leland’s love of children – they have a three-year old son, Jarrett David – “that fuels his work in Ethiopia where children are hungry. He realizes what a feeling of hopelessness the parents have,” Mrs. Leland says.

Leland serves on two other Congressional committees: the Energy and Commerce Committee and the Committee on Post Office and Civil Services. But the hunger committee “is really important to him,” says Mrs. Leland. “Mickey is now in his sixth term. He could easily rest on his laurels and get re-elected. I’m proud that he takes the initiative on these issues,” she says.

The kind of national media that Leland attracts when he travels to Africa invariably overshadows domestic efforts and hampers long term development efforts overseas. Leland himself admits that the emergencies of food aid – “the continuing calamities in the world – tend to draw our attention and too much of our energies to them, and away from (needed) systemic changes.”

The committee’s current concentration on reducing infant mortality rates (especially in the United States) and its emphasis on redefining hunger as a question of food security rather than the narrow and traditional malnutrition, are steps toward those systemic changes, Leland says.

What the hunger committee has yet to accomplish, is pulling together the more than 95 government assistance programs into a cohesive, simplified system that poor, ill-educated and busy families can effectively utilized.

During each session, the committee looks for ways to try to simplify the language of government red tape – such as the 35-page-plus food stamp application form that Emerson calls “worse than filling out your income tax form.” The 1988 Welfare Reform Act took some steps forward in looking at structure and revision, but the welfare system remains very complex.

Leland’s philosophy of life – the one that keeps him interested in humanitarian issues such as hunger – can be found in the book We Must Run While They Walk, a 1972 portrait of Tanzania’s Nyerere.

“The greatest impact that anybody’s thoughts ever had on me” was that book, Leland says. His 1972 trip to Tanzania – in fact his travels throughout the bushes of east and central Africa – provided the most broadening experience he has ever had, Leland says. He had planned a three week trip and ended up staying three months.

“I got ‘lost’ in Africa. I mean nobody knew where I was. My mother thought I was dead, my grandmother had just given up. But the fact is that I got totally absorbed in Africa.” Between the trip and the book, Leland found “the concrete that built my foundation.”

He believes that national boundaries are imaginary lines drawn for a matter of convenience. That matter of convenience is fine but on the other side of those imaginary lines are people just like us, and we have to see them as sacred. That’s the essence of my philosophy.”

Such a broad view of the world does get its share of criticism. Some in the mostly Hispanic and black 18th Congressional District that he represents, occasionally complain that he spends too much time on world issues and not enough on Texas matters. But his district continually sends Leland back to D.C. with a resounding 90 to 97 percent of the vote.

Having such a safe district allows Leland to be himself while in Congress, his colleagues say. He agrees.

“My politician character and my personal character all roll into one. I don’t have to put on an act to get my views across,” says Leland. He pauses. “As a matter of fact, I think the strength of my political persuasion is my own personality that I’ve developed over the years.”