Sheila Jackson Lee, outspoken Texas congresswoman, dies at 74
Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat who during three decades in the U.S. House of Representatives became one of the most prominent Black members of Congress and a ubiquitous champion of African American and women’s rights, died Friday at a hospital in Houston. She was 74.
Her death was confirmed by her family. Rep. Jackson Lee announced in June that she had pancreatic cancer. She had been treated years earlier for breast cancer.
Rep. Jackson Lee, the daughter of a hospital orderly and a night-shift vocational nurse, grew up far from Texas, in the New York City borough of Queens. She received a bachelor’s degree from Yale University and a law degree from the University of Virginia before moving with her husband to Texas, where he was from, and where she began her political career as a municipal judge and a member of the Houston City Council.
She was first elected in 1994 to her Houston-based congressional seat, which was once held by the charismatic African American congresswoman Barbara Jordan. Rep. Jackson Lee quickly established herself as an outspoken advocate for racial and gender equality, voting rights and the revision of the criminal justice system.
She was a lead sponsor of legislation that in 2021, after decades of lobbying by advocates, recognized as a federal holiday June 19, or Juneteenth, a date that has come to memorialize the end of slavery in the U.S.
She also spearheaded legislation that in 2022 reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act, which was enacted in 1994 but expired in 2019. The original law provided protections for women against domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking. Under Rep. Jackson Lee’s leadership, it was expanded, among other ways, to specifically address Native American, transgender and immigrant women.
Critics accused Rep. Jackson Lee of drawing attention to herself, in addition to her causes. She offered dizzying arrays of amendments that had little to no chance of passing and, according to C-SPAN data, was among the members who spent the most time speaking on the House floor, including when the chamber was empty.
At the annual State of the Union address, she made it her practice to arrive hours in advance to secure an aisle seat from which to be seen on TV interacting with the president as he made his way to and from the podium.
Also complicating Rep. Jackson’s Lee reputation were accounts of her mistreatment of staff members, whom she reportedly required to chauffeur her around Washington, dispatched on personal errands, phoned after midnight and scolded harshly for what she regarded as their shortcomings.
Her office was known for having one of the highest turnover rates on Capitol Hill. In 2023, during an unsuccessful run for mayor of Houston, she expressed regret when a recording emerged of her insulting her campaign staff in a profanity-laced tirade.
Rep. Jackson Lee said she attempted to ignore the criticism aimed at her and attributed it, at least in part, to sexism and racism.
“I have been in the skin of a woman and an African-American, and I understand the injustices we have to live through,” she told the Texas Tribune in 2017. “I just take it with a smile because I love the institution” of Congress.
Politicians are often labeled, fairly or unfairly, as “workhorses” or “showhorses.” In many estimations, Rep. Jackson Lee fell squarely in the latter category. Robert Stein, a professor of political science at Rice University in Houston who followed Rep. Jackson Lee’s career for decades, said she was a “showhorse” – but not in a negative way.
“She was a showhorse for the causes she cared about,” Stein said, also remarking that “she staked out a career in the Congress that I think suited her and her abilities.”
In response to criticism that Rep. Jackson Lee was a publicity-seeking politician who demanded too much of her staff, Stein cited what he described as a double standard for men and women in politics. “If this was a white male, we would have said he was a great politician,” he said. “When she’s a Black woman from (Queens) who moves to Houston – nobody ever gave her a break.”
Admirers lauded her for pushing causes that she believed in even when she was unlikely to see them prevail. Foremost among those causes was the campaign to obtain reparations for African Americans as a means of redressing the enduring consequences of slavery.
In 2021, Rep. Jackson Lee successfully pushed H.R. 40, a bill to create a commission on the matter of reparations, through the Judiciary Committee. That committee vote was as far as the proposal had advanced on Capitol Hill since then-congressman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) began advocating reparations more than three decades earlier.
“We’re asking for people to understand the pain, the violence, the brutality, the chattel-ness of what we went through,” Rep. Jackson Lee said. “And, of course, we’re asking for harmony, reconciliation, reason to come together as Americans.”
Within the House, Rep. Jackson Lee served as chief deputy Democratic whip and was a member of the Homeland Security and Budget committees in addition to the Judiciary Committee.
In her district, she was known as a consummate politician, always on hand for weddings and funerals.
Rep. Jackson Lee took pride in her reputation for showing up, whether at local gatherings or the State of the Union address. It was her job, she said, to represent her constituents as forcefully as she could.
In 2009, when President Barack Obama made his first address to a joint session of Congress, Rep. Jackson Lee was ready when the transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, appeared in the chamber.
“As he walked down the aisle, I made the final push for Houston being in the president’s budget … and for Houston being the first city that Secretary LaHood visited, and what were the results? We got in the president’s ’09 budget … and he made our city the first city to visit,” Rep. Jackson Lee told the Texas Tribune. “I hosted him the entire day.”
Chance at an education
Sheila Jackson, one of two children, was born in Queens on Jan. 12, 1950.
Her father had been an artist for Marvel Comics in the 1940s, but he lost his job when white colleagues returned to theirs after serving in World War II, according to the Houston Chronicle. He later worked as a day laborer and as a hospital orderly. Her mother cared for premature babies at a hospital affiliated with the Salvation Army.
Rep. Jackson Lee attended New York City public schools as they started to desegregate in the 1950s and ’60s. She was bused to predominantly white schools, she recounted, where she overcame discrimination to become involved in student government.
Her junior year, she ran for student council vice president but was elected secretary, a position that she assumed her classmates deemed more appropriate for a female student, she told the Chronicle.
She did not know if she would have the opportunity to attend college until she received a scholarship established at New York University for Black students after the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Years later, reflecting on the tragedy that made it possible to pursue her education, she told the New York Times that she was a beneficiary of the “hills and valleys, the broken bodies and broken hearts, the loss of life of many who have gone on before me.”
She later transferred to Yale, where she studied political science and graduated in 1972, and where she met her future husband, Elwyn Lee, whom she married the next year. She received her law degree from the University of Virginia in 1975.
The couple resided for three years in Washington, where she worked for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, convened to investigate King’s death and the slaying of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Rep. Jackson Lee and her husband then moved to Houston, where she practiced law and mounted three unsuccessful races for local judgeships. She received an appointment to the municipal bench before winning an at-large seat on the Houston City Council in 1989.
In 1994, she challenged Rep. Craig Washington (D), elected in 1989 to fill the seat left vacant when Rep. Mickey Leland (D) was killed in a plane crash in Ethiopia. Rep. Jackson Lee defeated Washington 63% to 37% in the primary, then easily won the general election in her highly Democratic district.
Upon her election to the House, Rep. Jackson Lee was awarded a seat on the Judiciary Committee, which under Republican leadership voted, along party lines, to support the impeachment of President Bill Clinton in 1998. Clinton was accused of lying under oath about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Rep. Jackson Lee was one of Clinton’s most ardent defenders, remarking that “I know oppression when I see it” and denouncing Clinton’s impeachment trial in the Senate as “a sledgehammer to catch a fly.” He was acquitted in 1999.
In 2019, Rep. Jackson Lee stepped down as chairman of a Judiciary subcommittee and as chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation amid accusations that she fired an aide who had also worked for the foundation and who threatened to sue the foundation over an alleged sexual assault by a supervisor.
Rep. Jackson Lee denied having retaliated against the woman and was reinstated in 2021 as chairman of the subcommittee on crime, terrorism and homeland security.
In her 2023 run for Houston mayor, the nation’s fourth-largest city by population, Rep. Jackson Lee had the endorsements of former president Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton, but she was soundly defeated in a nonpartisan runoff by a longtime Democratic state senator, John Whitmire, who attracted support from centrist Democrats, Republicans and independents with an emphasis on public safety.
In the 2024 congressional election, Rep. Jackson Lee defeated a Democratic challenger, former Houston City Council member Amanda Edwards, in the March primary.
Survivors include her husband, of Houston; two children, Jason Lee of Chicago and Erica Carter of Houston; a brother; and two grandchildren.
Reflecting on the forceful approach she took to work on behalf of her constituents and causes, Rep. Jackson Lee told the Times in 1999 that she needed to “make a difference.”
“I don’t have wealth to write a check,” she said. “But maybe I can be a voice arguing consistently for change.”