WASHINGTON, July 20: U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who helped lead federal efforts to protect women from domestic violence and establish Juneteenth as a national holiday, has died. She was 74.
Lillie Conley, her chief of staff, confirmed Friday night that Jackson Lee, who had pancreatic cancer, had died.
The Democrat has represented her district in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, since 1995. She previously had breast cancer and announced on June 2 that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
“The road forward will not be easy, but I have faith that God will strengthen me,” Jackson Lee said in a statement at the time.
Jackson Lee had just been elected to the Houston district once represented by Barbara Jordan, the first black woman elected to Congress from a Southern state since Reconstruction. In 1995, she was immediately appointed to the House Judiciary Committee, a high-profile committee.
“They just saw me, I guess, through my profile, through Barbara Jordan’s work,” Jackson Lee told the Houston Chronicle in 2022. “I thought it was an honor, because they assumed I would be the person they needed.”
Jackson Lee quickly established herself as a fierce advocate for women and minorities, and a leader for House Democrats on many social justice issues, from police reform to reparations for descendants of enslaved people. She led the first rewrite of the Violence Against Women Act in nearly a decade, which included protections for Native American, transgender, and immigrant women.
Jackson Lee was also one of the leading lawmakers behind the 2021 effort to have Juneteenth recognized as the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was established in 1986. The holiday marks the day in 1865 that the last enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, finally learned of their freedom.
Jackson Lee is a native of Queens, New York, graduated from Yale and received her law degree from the University of Virginia. She served as a judge in Houston before being elected to the Houston City Council in 1989. She ran for Congress in 1994. She was an advocate for gay rights and an early opponent of the Iraq War in 2003.
Jackson Lee routinely won re-election to Congress with ease. The few times she faced a challenger, she never received less than two-thirds of the vote. Jackson Lee considered leaving Congress in 2023 in a bid to become Houston’s first black female mayor, but was defeated in a runoff. She then easily won the Democratic nomination for the 2024 general election.
During the mayoral campaign, Jackson Lee expressed regret and said “everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and respect” after an unverified audio recording was released in which the lawmaker allegedly reprimanded his staff.
In 2019, Jackson Lee resigned from two leadership positions on the House Judiciary Committee and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, the fundraising arm of the Congressional Black Caucus, following a lawsuit from a former employee who alleged her sexual assault complaint was mishandled. (AP)