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Carrie P. Meek

Representative, 1993–2003, Democrat from Florida

Carrie P. Meek Congressional Pictorial Directory, 103rd Congress

Carrie P. Meek won election to the House in 1992 as one of the first African-American lawmakers to represent Florida in Congress since Reconstruction. Focusing on the economic and immigration issues of her district, Meek secured a coveted seat on the House Appropriations Committee as a freshman Representative. While able to work with Republicans on health issues, she was a sharp critic of welfare reform efforts during the mid-1990s.

Carrie Pittman, daughter of Willie and Carrie Pittman, was born on April 29, 1926, in Tallahassee, Florida. Her grandmother was born and raised in Georgia as a slave. Carrie Pittman’s parents began their married life as sharecroppers, though her father went on to become a caretaker and her mother a laundress and the owner of a boardinghouse. She was the youngest of 12 children, a tomboy whom her siblings nicknamed “Tot.” She lived near the old Florida capitol in a neighborhood called the “Bottom.” Pittman was a track and field star while earning a B.S. in biology and physical education at Florida A&M University in 1946. She enrolled at the University of Michigan graduate school because blacks were banned from Florida graduate schools, though the state government would pay out-of-state tuition, “if we agreed to get out of Dodge,” she later recalled.1 She graduated in 1948 with an M.S. degree in public health and physical education. Afterward, Pittman taught at Bethune Cookman, a historically black college in Daytona Beach, where she coached basketball and taught biological sciences and physical education. She later taught at Florida A&M in Tallahassee. In 1961, as a divorced mother of two young children, Carrie Pittman Meek moved to Miami-Dade Community College, where she spent the next three decades teaching and administrating, eventually serving as special assistant to the vice president of the college. In 1978, she won election to the Florida state house of representatives, defeating a field of 12 candidates. She served from 1979 to 1983, during which time she chaired the education appropriations subcommittee. From 1983 to 1993, Meek served in the Florida senate. She was the first African-American woman elected to that body and the first black to serve there since Reconstruction. She earned a reputation as a particularly effective legislator, passing a minority business enterprise law and other legislation to promote literacy and reduce the school dropout rate.2

In 1992, when incumbent Congressman Bill Lehman (a veteran 10-term Democrat) decided to retire, Meek captured the Democratic nomination for his newly reapportioned district that ran through northern Miami suburbs in Dade County. She ran unopposed in the general election. Since Meek essentially clinched the seat by winning the September primary in the heavily Democratic district, she later claimed to be the first African American elected to represent Florida in Congress since Reconstruction. Democrats Corrine Brown and Alcee L. Hastings, who prevailed over opponents in the November general election in two other Florida districts, were sworn in with Meek on January 3, 1993.

Meek entered Congress at age 66 and immediately launched into an ambitious agenda belied by her soft southern accent and grandmotherly demeanor. “Don’t let her fool you. She is not a little old lady from the ghetto,” a Florida political observer noted at the time of her election. “Carrie Meek is a player.”3 Meek intensively—and successfully—lobbied for a seat on the Appropriations Committee, a virtually unheard of assignment for a freshman legislator. When the Republicans took control of the House in 1994, Meek was bumped off Appropriations and reassigned to the Budget Committee and the Government Reform and Oversight Committee. In 1996, she returned to the Appropriations Committee and eventually served on two of its subcommittees: Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government and VA, HUD, and Independent Agencies.

Meek focused on the needs of her district, which included issues arising from unemployment, immigration, and even natural disaster. Shortly after arriving on Capitol Hill, Meek sought federal aid for her district, which encompassed Homestead, Florida, the town that bore the brunt of Hurricane Andrew’s devastation in August 1992. She used her Appropriations seat, however, principally to try to expand federal programs to create jobs and provide initiatives for blacks to open their own businesses. Meek also authored a measure to modify Social Security laws to cover household workers. On behalf of the Haitian community in her district, Meek sought to extend the period of stay in the country for immigrants and refugees excluded from two 1997 bills addressing Central American immigration. In 1999, she worked to get a more accurate census count in her district by providing a measure whereby welfare recipients familiar with their poor, traditionally undercounted neighborhoods could temporarily work as census employees without losing their benefits.4

On issues of national scope, Meek developed a cooperative and congenial style punctuated with partisan episodes. For instance, she was able to work with Republicans to change cigarette label warnings, to reflect the fact that a higher number of African Americans suffer from several smoking-related diseases. She also worked with Republican Anne Northup of Kentucky to increase funding for lupus disease research and to provide federal grants for college students with poor reading skills due to learning disabilities.5 But, in early 1995, amid the controversy surrounding Speaker Newt Gingrich’s $4.5 million book advance, Meek denounced him on the House Floor. “If anything, now, how much the Speaker earns has grown much more dependent upon how hard his publishing house hawks his book,” Meek said. “Which leads me to the question of exactly who does this Speaker really work for.… Is it the American people or his New York publishing house?” Republicans shouted Meek down and struck her remarks from the Congressional Record.6 She also charged that Republicans were balancing the budget on the backs of America’s working poor, elderly, and infirm by gutting the welfare system. “The spending cuts that the House approved today fall mainly on the weakest members of our society, on the sick and on the elderly,” she said in June 1997. “Tomorrow we will be voting on tax cuts that mainly favor the wealthy.… Today, the House voted to rob from the poor so that tomorrow the majority can help the rich.”7

In 2002, citing her age, Meek declined to seek certain re-election to a sixth term. “I wish I could say I was tired of Congress,” Meek told the Miami Herald. “I love it still. But at age 76, understandably, some of my abilities have diminished. I don’t have the same vigor that I had at age 65. I have the fire, but I don’t have the physical ability. So it’s time.”8 Her youngest child, 35-year-old Kendrick Meek, who served in the Florida senate, announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination in her district. When Kendrick Meek won the November 2002 general election, he became just the second child to directly succeed his mother in Congress.9 It also marked just the fifth time that the child of a woman Member served in Congress.10

Further Reading

“Meek, Carrie P.” Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress, 1774–Present, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=M000628.

Footnotes

  1. William Booth, “The Strong Will of Carrie Meek; A Florida Sharecropper’s Daughter Takes Her Stand on Capitol Hill,” 16 December 1992, Washington Post: C1.
  2. “Carrie P. Meek,” Associated Press Candidate Biographies, 1992; Politics in America, 1994 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 1993): 310–311.
  3. Booth, “The Strong Will of Carrie Meek.”
  4. Almanac of American Politics, 2000 (Washington, D.C.: National Journal Inc., 1999): 409.
  5. Politics in America, 2002 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Inc., 2001): 240.
  6. Karen Foerstel, Biographical Dictionary of Women in Congress (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999): 184.
  7. Politics in America, 2002: 240–241.
  8. Andrea Robinson and Tyler Bridges, “Carrie Meek to Retire: She Made History from Tallahassee to Capitol Hill,” 7 July 2002, Miami Herald: A1.
  9. James Kee of West Virginia, who succeeded his mother Maude Kee in 1965, was the first.
  10. See Familial Connections of Women Representatives and Senators in Congress http://womenincongressdev.house.gov/historical-data/familial-connections-in-congress.html.