Former Florida Rep. Carrie Meek died at age 95 in her Miami home on Sunday. Known for her fiery speeches and trailblazing career, Meek was among the first class of Black Floridians elected to Congress post-Reconstruction.
According to ABC News, her family did not confirm a cause of death, only that she suffered a long illness.
Meek, the youngest of 12 children born to a sharecropper and laundress, won her first Congressional race at 66 years old in 1992 after she ran unopposed by Republican candidates for her Miami-Dade County seat. Before her bid for Congress, Meek was Miami-Dade Community College’s first Black professor, associate dean and assistant to the vice president, a member of Florida’s state House and the first Black woman voted to the state’s senate.
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Alcee Hastings and Corrine Brown joined Meek in January 1993 as the first Black Floridians to serve in Congress since 1876 as the state’s districts had been redrawn by the federal courts in accordance with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
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 was possible.
“They always said the day would come when we would be recognized for our character,” she told The Associated Press in an interview that day.
Source: Trailblazing Legend, Former Florida Rep. Carrie Meek Dies at 95
