Never backed down in debates

Meek was an unapologetic Democrat who sided with her party on most liberal issues but sometimes sided with Republicans, too, like opposing cuts to the U.S. military or on normalizing relations with Cuba. And she never shied away from a confrontation over her legislative priorities.

While serving in the Legislature, Meek regularly intensified floor debates, once threatening to camp out on the doorstep of a colleague who was reluctant to increase funding for Jackson Memorial Hospital, according to Miami Herald archives.

And if she thought a particular bill needed to be killed, she waved a black flag adorned with a skull and crossbones, declaring the measure needed to be “black-flag dead,” a term she popularized. (“They wanted my son to use it,” she once told a Herald reporter in 1999, referring to Kendrick Meek, who was then a state representative.)

As much as it didn’t matter what issue she debated, it also didn’t matter who she was debating against.

In 2002, as then-Gov. Jeb Bush campaigned in Miami with Black lawmakers during his re-election bid, Meek confronted him over the detainment of 211 Haitian migrants who had reached South Florida on a raft at the time.

She called the arrests discriminatory and asked for Bush to call his brother, then-President George Bush, and demand for Haitians to be treated the same as Cuban migrants seeking asylum. And once, fresh out of her first reelection to Congress, Meek provoked a massive argument on the floor of the House of Representatives when she chided the House Speaker at the time, Newt Gingrich, for allegedly negotiating a multi-million dollar book deal with a publishing company that had a big stake in telecommunications legislation at the time.

Meek said of the potential money Gingrich stood to gain as “a whole lot of dust where I come from.” The uproar that ensued from Meek’s speech, which Republicans later struck partly from the Congressional Record because they claimed it violated rules of propriety, made front pages in The New York Times, the Washington Post and TV news.

“The only thing missing up here is my black flag,” she told the Herald about the episode, with a wide smile.

While in the House, Meek focused her attention on issues such as economic development, healthcare, education and housing. In her first term in Congress, she sponsored and passed a measure providing Social Security benefits for nannies and day laborers. After Hurricane Andrew, she helped to obtain more than $100 million in federal aid for South Florida, and joined the fight to rebuild what had been Homestead Air Force Base.