Congressman Alcee Hastings, after career of triumph, calamity

Congressman Alcee Hastings, whose life was marked by perseverance, calamity and a comeback, has died. He was 84.

Alcee Lamar Hastings was born on Sept. 5, 1936, in Altamonte Springs. His parents, Julius C. and Mildred L. Hastings, were domestic workers.

He had to attend a high school for Black students — much farther from home than schools for white students. Recalling his youth 70 years later, he said his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents weren’t allowed to vote and vowed: “I’m not going back to that era.”

Hastings crusaded against racial injustice as a civil rights lawyer, became a federal judge who was impeached and removed from office, and went on to win 15 congressional elections, becoming Florida’s senior member of Congress.

He died Tuesday morning, a longtime friend said.

In late 2018, Hastings was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. For much of the ensuing two years, he continued public appearances between medical treatments, but more recently he hadn’t been in public. In recent days, he had been in hospice care.

The Democratic congressman was a singular figure in South Florida politics; he repeatedly broke barriers and made history — not always positively.

Civil rights

As a newly licensed young lawyer, Hastings moved to Fort Lauderdale, where he partnered with W. George Allen starting in 1964. Broward was not a welcoming place for a young Black man in the early 1960s. When he arrived to join Allen’s firm, a motel wouldn’t rent him a room.

During much of the ’60s and ’70s, Hastings has said, there were parts of the county where it wasn’t safe for Black people. The many civil rights cases filed by Hastings and Allen, who died in 2019, included lawsuits against a restaurant popular with other lawyers and judges — which wouldn’t serve them because they were Black — and desegregating Broward County schools.

Speaking at a national gathering of Black elected officials at the Westin Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort on the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Hastings recalled what it was like when he came to the community. “I couldn’t go to that beach that you all see now,” he said.

In the early days of his career, the justice system in which Hastings practiced was dominated by racists, Finkelstein said at the 2019 luncheon honoring him. Hastings was a “howling voice” attempting to change Broward from a “little cracker town that was racist and mean and vicious.”

Eager for attention for himself, his law practice, and the cause, Hastings made several unsuccessful runs for public office, most notably a candidacy for the 1970 Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. It wasn’t a race the 29-year-old expected to win. Rather, it was a campaign to show people of all races that a Black candidate could run for such an important job.

Judiciary

In 1977, then-Gov. Reubin Askew appointed Hastings as a Broward Circuit Court judge. In 1979, then-President Jimmy Carter nominated Hastings to the U.S. District Court, making him Florida’s first Black federal judge.

But that lifetime appointment lasted just 10 years — and turned into the lowest point of Hastings’ career.

In 1981, Hastings was indicted on charges of conspiring to solicit a $150,000 bribe from an FBI agent posing as a racketeer trying to buy his way out of a prison sentence. In 1983, Hastings’ criminal trial ended when the jury found him not guilty.

Six years later, Congress took up the issue. Concluding he lied during the criminal trial, the House impeached Hastings and the Senate convicted him on eight of 11 articles, removing him from the bench. The Senate did not vote to disqualify him from holding future office.

Decades later, that period of Hastings’ life remained controversial.

Many Republicans said it meant he couldn’t be trusted and shouldn’t be taken seriously; even after he’d been elected multiple times to Congress, some objected every time his views got news coverage.

Finkelstein, who became a lawyer at the same time Hastings became a federal judge, disagreed. He said the prosecution was retaliation for Hastings’ refusal to bow to the wishes of powerful, establishment interests.

“In the ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s, the government only — only — only went after Black men that ascended to power,” Finkelstein said.

Congress

Three years and two weeks after the Senate convicted him, Hastings was elected to the House of Representatives, becoming one of three Black Floridians who went to Congress that year — the first time Florida had sent a Black representative to Washington since 1877, when the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction ended.

He was re-elected 14 times, making him dean of the Florida delegation. When he faced opponents from Democrats in primaries or Republicans in general elections, he typically won by margins of at least 3-to-1. Sometimes no one even came forward to run against him.

Hastings represented most of the African American and Caribbean American communities in Broward and Palm Beach counties, though the boundaries and district numbers changed over the decades.

His presence was precisely what was envisioned by drafters of early 1980s revisions to the Voting Rights Act, when they provided for districts with boundaries drawn to maximize the election chances of minority lawmakers.

Hastings sometimes used his influence in subtle and unseen ways. A few years ago, riding from one political event to another on a major thoroughfare in an African American neighborhood in his district, the car went over an unusually rough set of railroad tracks. Hastings turned to an aide with an instruction to get in touch with the railroad, and lean on it to get the crossing fixed.

His agenda was broader than race. Hastings advocated on behalf of women’s rights and LGBT people, and he was keenly interested in world affairs, championing Israel and serving as chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, known as the Helsinki Commission.

Hastings didn’t have a long list of marquee legislative achievements. He exercised influence internally, serving on the Rules Committee, a critical panel through which the majority party controls the flow of business on the House floor.

The events that led to his impeachment had a significant impact at least once during his time in Congress. When Democrats took control of the House in the 2006 elections, Hastings was in line to become chairman of the Intelligence Committee. But after Republicans attempted to use his background as a political cudgel, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed over Hastings and picked a different chairman. Alcee Lamar Hastings was born on Sept. 5, 1936, in Altamonte Springs. His parents, Julius C. and Mildred L. Hastings, were domestic workers.