John Conyers, Jr.

John Conyers, Jr. (born May 16, 1929, Detroit, Michigan, U.S.—died October 27, 2019, Detroit) was an American politician who served as a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the state of Michigan from 1965 to 2017. He was the longest-serving African American member of the U.S. Congress.

Conyers’s father was a labour organizer and an international representative with the United Automobile Workers (UAW), a North American union of workers in the automotive and other vehicular industries. After graduating from high school, Conyers worked at an automotive plant and took night classes at Wayne State University in Detroit. He interrupted his schooling in 1950 to join the U.S. Army, and he eventually served as a second lieutenant in the Army Corps of Engineers during the Korean War (1950–53). After he was discharged in 1954, he returned to Wayne State and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1957 and a law degree in 1958. He passed the Michigan state bar exam a year later and began to practice law in Detroit.

Conyers worked as a legislative aide to Democratic U.S. Rep. John D. Dingell, Jr., of Michigan from 1958 to 1961. In 1964 Conyers was elected to his first term as a U.S. representative; he was reelected 26 times. During his career of more than 50 years in the House of Representatives, he was a staunch supporter of civil rights. In 1971 he and 12 other African American House members founded the Congressional Black Caucus, a group dedicated to improving the lives of African Americans and other underrepresented communities. In April 1968, just four days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Conyers introduced the first of many bills to establish a federal holiday in King’s honour. A bill creating the holiday was finally signed into law by Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1983. Beginning in the late 1980s, Conyers also regularly introduced measures to investigate the possibility of reparations for the descendants of enslaved people, but none of them was put to a vote by the full House.

In the late 1980s and early ’90s Conyers headed the House Committee on Government Operations, and in the early 21st century he became the first African American to serve as chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers was the only member of the Judiciary Committee to participate in impeachment inquiries against both Pres. Richard M. Nixon in the early 1970s and Pres. Bill Clinton in the late 1990s. (Conyers supported the impeachment of Nixon but opposed that of Clinton.) Conyers resigned from Congress in 2017 after the House Ethics Committee opened an investigation of his alleged sexual harassment of female members of his staff. He denied the allegations.

Outside Congress, Conyers was a long-standing executive board member of the Detroit chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He also served as an executive board member of the Detroit branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).