A staunch HIV advocate in Congress, U.S. Representative Sheila Jackson Lee has died at age 74, her family said Friday night in a statement. While the announcement did not give a cause of death, Rep. Jackson Lee disclosed on June 2 that she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
“The road ahead will not be easy, but I stand in faith that God will strengthen me,” she said at the time, declaring she was continuing her campaign for re-election in November to what would have been her 16th term representing much of Houston.
She had been a survivor of breast cancer, diagnosed in 2011 before announcing the following year that she was cancer free.
Last year, she unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Houston, turning her attention to returning to Congress. She won the Democratic primary election in March and was expected to win the general election this November. She was one of the two longest serving members of the Texas congressional delegation.
She was the author and lead sponsor of the 2021 legislation that made Juneteenth a federal holiday.
“I thought it was extremely important,” she said on CNN in 2022, “to pass a federal holiday that would give America a moment to be able to reflect not just on the jubilation of freedom, but also the brutality of slavery and what it meant to human beings.”
Throughout her 30-year tenure in the House, she advocated for social justice and public health. She spoke out against HIV stigma and helped direct federal HIV funding to Houston. In 2022, she led re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which had expired in 2019.
Born on Jan. 12, 1950 in the Queens, a borough of New York City, Jackson Lee had originally planned to become an executive secretary. The assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when she was a student at Jamaica High School, however, changed her life.
She attended New York University on a scholarship for Black students, then later transferred to Yale, as soon as the school accepted female undergraduates, where she graduated with a degree in political science in 1972. She earned a law degree in 1975 from the University of Virginia.
When her husband, Elwyn Cornelius Lee, was offered a teaching job in Houston, the couple relocated. Lee, who survives his wife, is a senior administrator at the University of Houston.
Working as a lawyer for 12 years, she became a judge in 1987 and was elected to the Houston City Council in 1990. In 1994, she won election to the U.S. House of Representatives.
It is unclear what will happen to her congressional seat—how long it will remain vacant, and how it will be filled. According to the political new website Roll Call, Texas law requires a special election to fill a U.S. House seat on the next “uniform election date,” which would be the Nov. 5 general election date. But that date must be at least five weeks from when the election is “ordered” by the governor. Assuming that there’s first a Democratic Party primary election, the general election to fill the congressional seat might not take place until the next uniform election date—in May 2025. All this depends on when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, “orders” the special election.
Houston’s local NPR station notes that Jackson Lee is the third member of the Congressional Black Caucus to die of pancreatic cancer in just over four years, following Reps. John Lewis of Alabama, who died in 2020, and Alcee Hastings of Florida, who died in 2021.
Rep. Jackson Lee often responded to critics by saying that she was merely serving the people she represented.
“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.”
COMPILED BY RICK GUASCO from various news sources including Houston Public Media, the New York Times, Reuters and Roll Call.