Representative Carrie Meek, D-Fla., pictured here speaking during services at Mount Tabor Mission Baptist Church in Miami, in 2002.
Wilfredo Lee / AP
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Wilfredo Lee / AP
Representative Carrie Meek, D-Fla., pictured here speaking during services at Mount Tabor Mission Baptist Church in Miami, in 2002.
Wilfredo Lee / AP
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – Carrie Meek, the grandson of a slave and the daughter of a sharecropper who became one of the first Blacks elected to Congress since Reconstruction, died Sunday. She is 95 years old.
Family spokesman Adam Sharon said Meek died at his home in Miami after a long illness. The family did not specify the cause of death.
Meek began his congressional career at an age where many people begin to retire. She was 66 years old when she easily won the 1992 Democratic primary in her Miami-Dade County. No Republicans opposed her in the general election.
Alcee Hastings and Corrine Brown joined Meek in January 1993 as the first Black Person to serve in Congress since 1876 as state districts were redrawn by federal courts under the Voting Rights Act. elected in 1965.
On her first day in Congress, Meek reflected that while her grandmother, a slave on a Georgia farm, could never have dreamed of such an accomplishment, her parents told her that anything is possible.
“They always say that the day will come when we will be recognized for our character,” she told The Associated Press in an interview that day.
In Congress, Meek supports affirmative action, economic opportunity for the poor, and efforts to strengthen democracy and ease immigration restrictions in Haiti, the birthplace of many of her constituencies.
She is also known for her liberal views, idyllic yet powerful speech, and colorful Republican Party rave reviews.
“The last Republican to do something for me was Abraham Lincoln,” she told the state delegation to the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
Meek joined his son Kendrick, a military veteran and state senator, in 2000 at the office of Florida Governor Jeb Bush to protest the end of affirmative action policies. She has long argued in favor of such policies, ever since earning her master’s degree from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1948. At the time, Blacks were not admitted to graduate schools in the United States. Florida.
Meek decided not to seek a sixth term in 2002. Her son Kendrick succeeded in winning her heavily Democratic seat, a seat he had held for the previous four terms. when his bid for the US Senate was unsuccessful in 2010.
After leaving Congress, Carrie Meek returned to Miami and created a base to work on education and housing issues. She was also criticized for some of her business dealings.
She lobbied for a biotech park planned for Miami’s impoverished Liberty City neighborhood but never materialized. County authorities eventually began a criminal investigation, and the park’s developer was arrested in October 2009 accused of stealing nearly $1 million from the project.
Congressional records show Meek was paid while her son sought millions of federal dollars for the project. Meek said she was paid as a consultant, and both mother and daughter denied their efforts were involved.
Before entering politics, Meek worked as a teacher and administrator at Miami-Dade College.
She was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 1978, succeeding pioneering Black lawmaker Gwen Cherry, who was killed in a car crash. She became one of the first African-Americans and the first black woman to serve in the Florida Senate since the 1800s.
Carrie Pittman was born Willie and Carrie Pittman in Tallahassee on April 29, 1926, and was the youngest of 12 children. Her father worked in the nearby fields as a rice seller and her mother took over the laundry of white families.
She graduated from Florida A&M University in 1946 with degrees in biology and physical education. The university named its building the Black historical archive in her honor in 2007. She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
She accepted a position at Bethune Cookman College as an instructor and became the school’s first women’s basketball coach. In 1958, she returned to Florida A&M as a faculty member in health and physical education. She held that position until 1961.
Meek continued her teaching career at Miami Dade Community College as the first Black professor, associate dean, and assistant to the Vice-Chancellor from 1961 to 1979.
She then began her pioneering political career, representing Florida’s 17th Congressional District as the Florida House Democratic Representative.
In Congress, Meek was a member of the Appropriations Committee and worked to secure $100 million in aid to rebuild Dade County as the area recovered from Hurricane Andrew.
She retired in 2002 and shifted her focus to the Carrie Meek Foundation, which she founded in November 2001, to provide the Miami-Dade community with much-needed resources, opportunity, and employment. Meek led the day-to-day operations of the Foundation until 2015 when she resigned due to declining health.
Meek is survived by her children Lucia Davis-Raiford, Sheila Davis Kinui and Kendrick B. Meek, seven grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, and numerous nieces and nephews.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
