Robert C. Weaver was the first black appointment as a United States Cabinet Secretary. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him in 1966. Weaver was an economist and academic and served as the first United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (H.U.D.) from 1966 to 1968. Weaver held a doctorate in economics from Harvard University, graduating in 1934. His mother’s grandfather was Dr. Robert Tanner Freeman, the first African American with a Harvard dentistry degree. Weaver had a long history serving the government, starting as an aid to the United States Secretary of the Interior in 1934. He served on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet, a group of African Americans who served as public policy advisors to the President.