R.I.P.

Carrie Meek, Pioneering Five-Term Florida Congresswoman, Dead at 95

The Black representative was 66 when she began her congressional career in 1992. She died Sunday after a long illness, a family spokesperson said.

Carrie Meek, one of the first Black Floridians elected to Congress since Reconstruction, died Sunday at her home in Miami. She was 95. Her death was confirmed by a family spokesperson, who did not specify the cause beyond noting she long suffered from an illness.

The daughter of a sharecropper and the granddaughter of a slave, Meek was 66 when she entered congressional politics. She won the 1992 Democratic congressional primary in her Miami district, and ran unopposed in the general election. A firebrand advocate for her northern Miami-Dade district, Meek lobbied on behalf of the area’s Black, immigrant, and poor populations. “My first priority in Congress is to develop job-producing programs,” she told The Washington Post weeks after her election.

Meek helped guarantee legal rights for Haitian immigrants, passed a measure providing Social Security benefits for nannies and day laborers, and secured $100 million in aid to rebuild her county in the wake of Hurricane Andrew. A regular fixture on the House floor, Meek fought for her legislative priorities fiercely: she once threatened to camp out on the doorstep of a colleague opposed to increasing funding for a hospital. Meek never lost a re-election, and retired in 2002.