Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, who was a leading voice for racial justice and progressive causes during the three decades she served in the House, died Friday. She was 74.
Her death was announced in a statement from her family. She said in June that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
“By God’s grace, I will be back at full strength soon,” she told constituents.
The Congressional Black Caucus, in a statement released late Friday, called Jackson Lee “a titan” and “a fierce advocate for social and economic justice, national and homeland security, energy independence, and children and working families.”
Jackson Lee, a former member of the Houston City Council who was elected to Congress in 1994, was an irrepressible presence from the start, relentlessly lobbying senior members for speaking time and almost always getting her way.
To critics, she would say that she was just serving her constituents.
“You have an obligation to make sure that their concerns are heard, are answered,’‘ she said in a 1999 interview with The New York Times. “I need to make a difference. I don’t have wealth to write a check. But maybe I can be a voice arguing consistently for change.”
During her congressional career, Jackson Lee was chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee for Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, and as a senior member of the House Committees on the Judiciary, Homeland Security, and Budget.
What turned out to her final political race came last year, when she lost the Houston mayoral election to John Whitmire, a moderate Democrat and former state senator.
Jackson Lee entered the race with strong backing from many Democrats and Black voters but struggled to establish a message and expand her base of support.
She did not set out for a political career. When she and her brother were growing up in the New York City borough of Queens, where their mother worked as a nurse and their father as a hospital orderly, she set her sights on becoming an executive secretary.
But the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination when she was in high school altered her future. It triggered the creation of scholarships for Black students at New York University, one of which she got. And it filled her with a new fire: If King had died trying to create better opportunities for people like her, shouldn’t she reach as high as she could?
“I am a benefactor of the hills and valleys, the broken bodies and broken hearts, the loss of life of many who have gone on before me,” Jackson Lee said.
She transferred to Yale, from which she graduated in 1972, then earned a law degree from the University of Virginia. Marriage led her to Houston, where her husband, Elwyn C. Lee, is a senior administrator at the University of Houston.
She said that her political ambitions sprang in part from her desire to help women and Black and Hispanic people get a fair shot at success. Her seat in Congress, which once belonged to Barbara Jordan, came after four years on Houston’s City Council.
By last year’s race for mayor, many Houstonians were familiar with Jackson Lee, and she won endorsements from prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, who came to Houston to rally for the candidate, and local leaders, like the outgoing mayor, Sylvester Turner, and the county judge, Lina Hidalgo. Jackson Lee polled far better with Democrats than Whitmire before the vote.
Jackson Lee is survived by her husband and their two children, Jason and Erica.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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