Rep. John Conyers Jr. dies at 90
Former Detroit representative elected in 1964 became longest-serving African American in Congress.
John Conyers Jr., who became the longest-serving African American in Congress, co-founded the Congressional Black Caucus and helped create a national holiday in the name of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. but whose career rapidly crumbled at 88 when he resigned amid sexual harassment allegations, died Sunday at his home in Detroit. He was 90.
His spokeswoman Holly Baird confirmed the death.
A liberal Democrat from what is now Detroit’s 13th Congressional District, Conyers was first elected in 1964, becoming one of five African Americans in the House. His overwhelmingly Democratic constituents reelected him 26 times over a period spanning 10 presidents, from Lyndon Johnson to Donald Trump.
As the longest-serving member at the time of his resignation, Conyers earned the title “dean of the House of Representatives,” and this job security allowed him to promote liberal, sometimes controversial causes that won him a national following.
He co-sponsored the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discrimination at the ballot box. His fierce criticism of the Vietnam War led to clashes with Johnson and landed him on Richard Nixon’s “enemies list” of political opponents.
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Conyers voted against the USA Patriot Act because he feared it would roll back civil liberties. He later suggested that President George W. Bush should be impeached, saying he misled the country ahead of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Conyers’s twilight years were marred by allegations of sexual harassment.
According to legal documents published by BuzzFeed in November 2017, several of his female staff members said that he had approached them to request sex and that he had engaged in unwanted touching.
One former staff member received a settlement of more than $27,000 from Conyers’s office after alleging in 2015 that he fired her for not accepting his sexual advances. The congressman denied wrongdoing.
But after the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation and numerous representatives called for him to step down in November 2017, Conyers stepped down from his post as top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.
The next month, he announced his resignation, after 52 years in office.
“My legacy can’t be compromised or diminished in any way by what we are going through now,” Conyers declared defiantly. “This too shall pass.”
Before the scandal, Conyers had been an inspiration to African Americans from Detroit to the Deep South and became, in effect, a member of Congress at large.
“In many districts around the country, black voters did not feel represented by their leaders, so they would reach out to African American congressmen, like Conyers,” said Michael Fauntroy, who interned for Conyers in the early 1980s and is now an assistant professor of political science at Howard University.
Conyers, in turn, urged skeptical African Americans to get involved in politics. One of his early mottos was: “Register, vote, run for office. It’s power that counts.”
To better harness that power and secure passage of legislation on poverty, racism, human rights, unfair tax policies and health care, Conyers and 12 other African American House members founded the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971.
Conyers strongly backed the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination and was an early supporter of candidate Barack Obama, who was then a Democratic senator from Illinois.
Yet Conyers also could be caustic of fellow Democrats to demonstrate that he was not blindly loyal to anyone.
In 1979, he described President Jimmy Carter as a “hopeless, demented, honest, well-intentioned nerd who will never get past his first administration.” Decades later, Conyers criticized Obama for making foreign policy too dependent on military muscle.
His intention, Conyers said of Obama, was “to make him a better president.”