Daughter of sharecroppers

The daughter of Willie and Carrie Pittman, Meek was born April 29, 1926, in segregated Tallahassee. Meek’s parents were sharecroppers. Her father later became a caretaker and her mother was a laundress and owned a boarding house. Meek’s son, former U.S. Rep. Kendrick Meek, who succeeded her in representing what was then Florida’s Congressional District 17, recalled in a 2019 archival interview with the U.S. House of Representatives the impact of his mother’s early childhood on her life.

She would tell the story of being a Girl Scout and baking brownies with her troop to give out to state legislators, only to be barred from the Capitol because she was Black. She couldn’t walk past the sidewalk and the sergeant at arms would pick up the brownies from the Black Girl Scouts, as the white troop members walked past them into the Capitol, the same building she would later navigate as the first Black woman state senator in Florida.

“She shared those experiences with me to make sure that I was well-rooted and understood the Black experience in Florida,” Kendrick Meek said in the 2019 interview. “She, in many ways, was able to use those experiences to provide context to her work as a policymaker, and that’s what, I think, made her such a powerful changemaker.”

Meek told the Washington Post in an in interview in 1992 that as a child, she couldn’t try on shoes in stores because she was Black. There weren’t any decent recreational facilities to enjoy for Black folks. And even as she soared in sports as a track & field athlete while earning a degree in biology and physical education, she was not allowed to pursue a master’s degree in her home state of Florida, where she had graduated from Florida A&M University in 1946.

She went to the University of Michigan, where she earned a master’s in physical education and public health two years later. After earning her master’s degree, Meek went on to become an educator at different institutions throughout Florida, including at Bethune-Cookman University, the historically Black university in Daytona Beach, and later MiamiDade College, where she worked as an educator and college administrator.

Meek was the mother of three children: Lucia Davis, Sheila Davis, and Kendrick Meek.

Sheila Davis described her once to the Washington Post as “funny and warm and friendly” but also “very tough.”

“She had to be,” said Davis.