Former Michigan Rep. John Conyers, the longest-serving black member of Congress and founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, has died in his sleep, Fox News confirmed.
Detroit police said the 90-year-old former congressman, a Democrat, died at his home on Sunday, apparently of natural causes.
Conyers became one of only six black House members when he was won his first election by just 108 votes in 1964. The race was the beginning of more than 50 years of election dominance: Conyers regularly won elections with more than 80 percent of the vote.
Throughout his career, Conyers used his influence to push civil rights. After a 15-year fight, he won passage of legislation declaring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday, first celebrated in 1986. He regularly introduced a bill starting in 1989 to study the harm caused by slavery and the possibility of reparations for slaves' descendants. That bill never got past a House subcommittee.
Conyers was born and grew up in Detroit, where his father, John Conyers Sr., was a union organizer in the automotive industry and an international representative with the United Auto Workers union.
A veteran of the Korean War, Conyers later trained as a lawyer and entered the House in 1965. Almost immediately after Luther King’s death in 1968, Conyers introduced a bill calling for the MLK day national holiday. He pursued the bill until it was made law in 1983. Civil rights campaigner Rosa Parks was employed by him in...
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...his Detroit offices before she retired in 1988. Conyers was also an outspoken critic of the Iraq war, and was the first black lawmaker to sit on the House Judiciary Committee as chairman. He sat in on the impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. In 1989 and 1993, he ran for Detroit mayor but lost both times. He was inducted into the Civil Rights Hall of Fame in 2005.
His 53-year career ended in December 2017 after a number of women who used to work for the Congressman claimed they had been sexually assaulted by him. He resigned following calls from senior Democrats, including House speaker Nancy Pelosi and was the first sitting politician to do so amid sweeping revelations and allegations of sexual misconduct in the nation’s corridors of power, Hollywood and beyond. Conyers denied any wrongdoing. “My legacy can’t be compromised or diminished in any way by what we’re going through now,” he said at the time.
Detroit mayor Mike Duggan said he was “deeply saddened” by Conyers, adding: “From co-founding the Congressional Black Caucus to leading the fight in Congress to enshrine Martin Luther King’s birthday as a national holiday, John Conyers’ impact on our city and nation will never be forgotten,” Reuters reported.
