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Sheila Jackson Lee, Outspoken Texas Congresswoman, Dies at 74
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Sheila Jackson Lee, Outspoken Texas Congresswoman, Dies at 74

Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas who served in the U.S. House of Representatives for three decades and became one of the most prominent black members of Congress and a ubiquitous African-American and women’s rights advocate, died July 19 at a Houston hospital. She was 74.

Her death was confirmed by her family. Rep. Jackson Lee announced in June that she had pancreatic cancer. She had been treated for breast cancer years earlier.

Rep. Jackson Lee, the daughter of a hospital assistant and a night-shift nurse, grew up far from Texas, in the Queens borough of New York City. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a law degree from the University of Virginia before moving with her husband to his native Texas, where she began her political career as a municipal judge and a member of the Houston City Council.

She was first elected in 1994 to her Houston congressional seat once held by the charismatic African-American Congresswoman Barbara Jordan. Rep. Jackson Lee quickly established herself as an outspoken advocate for racial and gender equality, voting rights and criminal justice reform.

She was a key sponsor of legislation that in 2021, after decades of lobbying by advocates, recognized June 19 (or Juneteenth) as a federal holiday, marking the end of slavery in the United States.

She also spearheaded legislation in 2022 that reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, which passed in 1994 but expired in 2019. The original law provided protections for women against domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking. Under Rep. Jackson Lee’s leadership, the law was expanded to specifically target Native American, transgender and immigrant women, among other things.

Critics accused Rep. Jackson Lee of drawing attention to herself in addition to her goals. She presented a dizzying array of amendments that had little to no chance of passing and, according to C-SPAN data, was one of the members who spent the most time speaking on the House floor, even when the chamber was empty.

During the annual State of the Union address, she always arrived a few hours early to secure an aisle seat. From there, she could be seen on TV, talking to the president as he walked to and from the podium.

Further complicating Rep. Jackson’s reputation as Lee’s representative were stories of her mistreatment of staff members. She reportedly had to drive her around Washington, sent her on personal errands, called her after midnight and berated them sternly for what she perceived as their shortcomings.

Her office was known for one of the highest turnover rates on Capitol Hill. In 2023, during an unsuccessful race for mayor of Houston, she expressed regret when a recording surfaced of her insulting her campaign staff in an expletive-laced tirade.

Congresswoman Jackson Lee said she tried to ignore the criticism directed at her and attributed it, at least in part, to sexism and racism.

“I’ve lived in the shoes of a woman and an African-American, and I understand the injustices that we have to endure,” she told the Texas Tribune in 2017, adding, “I just take it with a smile, because I love the institution” of Congress.

Politicians are often, rightly or wrongly, labeled as “workhorses” or “show horses.” By many estimates, Rep. Jackson Lee fell squarely into the latter category. Robert Stein, a political science professor at Rice University in Houston who has followed Rep. Jackson Lee’s career for decades, said she was a “show horse” — but not in a negative way.

“She was a show horse for the causes she cared about,” Stein said, noting that “she pursued a career in Congress that I thought suited her and her abilities.”

In response to criticism that Rep. Jackson Lee was a publicity-seeking politician who demanded too much of her staff, Stein called out what he described as a double standard for men and women in politics. “If this was a white man, we would have said he was a great politician,” he said. “If she’s a black woman from (Queens) moving to Houston — no one ever gave her a chance.”

Admirers praised Rep. Jackson Lee for pushing causes she believed in, even when she was unlikely to see them win. Chief among those causes was the campaign to secure reparations for African Americans as a way to address the ongoing consequences of slavery.

In 2021, Rep. Jackson Lee successfully pushed through the Judiciary Committee H.R. 40, a bill to establish a commission on reparations. That committee vote was the furthest the bill had gotten on Capitol Hill since then-U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) began advocating for reparations more than three decades earlier.

“We’re asking people to understand the pain, the violence, the brutality, the indifference of what we’ve been through,” Rep. Jackson Lee said. “And of course we’re asking for harmony, reconciliation, a reason to come together as Americans.”

In the House of Representatives, Rep. Jackson Lee served as deputy Democratic leader and served on the Homeland Security and Budget Committees, in addition to the Judiciary Committee.

In her district she was known as a full-fledged politician, who always attended weddings and funerals.

Rep. Jackson Lee prided herself on her reputation for showing up, whether at local rallies or during the State of the Union address. Her job, she said, was to represent her constituents as forcefully as possible.

In 2009, when President Barack Obama delivered his first address to a joint session of Congress, Representative Jackson Lee was ready when Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood entered the chamber.

“As he was walking down the aisle, I made the last effort to get Houston into the President’s budget… and to make Houston the first city that Secretary LaHood visited, and what were the results? We got into the President’s budget in 2009… and he made our city the first city that was visited,” Rep. Jackson Lee told the Texas Tribune. “I have been receiving him all day.”

Chance of an education

Sheila Jackson, one of two children, was born on January 12, 1950, in Queens.

Her father was an illustrator for Marvel Comics in the 1940s, but he lost his job when white colleagues returned to their jobs after serving in World War II, the Houston Chronicle reported. He later worked as a day laborer and as a hospital orderly. Her mother cared for premature babies at a hospital affiliated with the Salvation Army.

Rep. Jackson Lee attended New York City public schools when they began to be desegregated in the 1950s and 1960s. She was bused to predominantly white schools, she said, where she overcame discrimination to join the student government.

In her junior year, she ran for vice president of the student council, but was elected secretary, a position she thought her classmates considered more appropriate for a woman, she told the Chronicle.

She didn’t know if she would have the chance to attend college until she received a scholarship established by New York University for black students after the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

Years later, looking back on the tragedy that made her education possible, she told The New York Times that she was the beneficiary of the “hills and valleys, the broken bodies and broken hearts, the loss of lives of many who have gone before me.”

She later transferred to Yale, where she studied political science and graduated in 1972, and where she met her future husband, Elwyn Lee, whom she married the following year. She received her law degree from the University of Virginia in 1975.

The couple lived in Washington for three years, where she worked for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which was established to investigate King’s death and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Rep. Jackson Lee and her husband then moved to Houston, where she practiced law and ran in three unsuccessful races for local judge. She was appointed to the municipal bench before winning an at-large seat on the Houston City Council in 1989.

In 1994, she challenged U.S. Rep. Craig Washington (D), who had been elected in 1989 to fill the seat left vacant when U.S. Rep. Mickey Leland (D) died in a plane crash in Ethiopia. Rep. Jackson Lee defeated Washington 63 percent to 37 percent in the primary and then easily won the general election in her heavily Democratic district.

Upon her election to the House of Representatives, Rep. Jackson Lee was given a seat on the Judiciary Committee, which, under Republican leadership, voted along party lines to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998. Clinton was accused of lying under oath about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Rep. Jackson Lee was one of Clinton’s most ardent defenders. He noted that he “knows oppression when I see it” and condemned Clinton’s impeachment trial in the Senate as “a sledgehammer to catch a fly.” He was acquitted in 1999.

In 2019, Rep. Jackson Lee resigned as chair of a subcommittee on the judiciary and as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation amid allegations that she fired an employee who had also worked for the foundation and who threatened to sue the foundation over alleged sexual assault by a supervisor.

Congressman Jackson Lee denied retaliating against the woman and was reinstated as chairman of the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security in 2021.

In her 2023 race for mayor of Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, Rep. Jackson Lee, was backed by former President Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton, but she was soundly defeated in a nonpartisan runoff by longtime Democratic senator John Whitmire, who drew support from moderate Democrats, Republicans and independents with a focus on public safety.

In the 2024 congressional elections, Representative Jackson Lee defeated a Democratic challenger, former Houston City Councilwoman Amanda Edwards, in the March primary.

Her survivors include her husband of Houston, two children, Jason Lee of Chicago and Erica Carter of Houston, a brother and two grandchildren.

Reflecting on the forceful approach she took to working on behalf of her constituents and causes, Rep. Jackson Lee told the Times in 1999 that she “had to make a difference.”

“I don’t have money to write a check,” she said. “But maybe I can be a voice that consistently advocates for change.”