Born: 17 March 1955, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is republished from the U.S. Congress. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1992, Cynthia A. McKinney was the first African-American woman from Georgia to serve in Congress. From her seat on the Armed Services and International Relations Committees, McKinney worked to address human rights issues and was known for her unorthodox views on U.S. foreign policy. After a decade on Capitol Hill, McKinney lost re-election in 2002. Two years later, voters in her DeKalb County district returned her to the House for a single term, making her one of a handful of Congresswomen who served nonconsecutive terms.
Cynthia Ann McKinney was born on March 17, 1955, in Atlanta, Georgia, to Leola Christion McKinney, a nurse, and James Edward “Billy” McKinney, a police officer, civil rights activist, and longtime legislator in the Georgia state house of representatives. Her father joined the Atlanta police department in 1948 as one of its first African-American officers. Cynthia McKinney was inspired to enter politics after participating in demonstrations with her father. While protesting the conviction of Tommy Lee Hines, a Black man with an intellectual disability who had been charged with raping a White woman in Alabama, McKinney and other protestors were threatened by the Ku Klux Klan. “That was probably my day of awakening,” McKinney recalled. “That day, I experienced hatred for the first time. I learned that there really are people who hate me without even knowing me. . . . That was when I knew that politics was going to be something I would do.”
McKinney graduated from St. Joseph High School and, in 1978, earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations from the University of Southern California. She later pursued graduate studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. In 1984, she served as a diplomatic fellow at Spelman College in Atlanta. She then taught political science at Agnes Scott College in Decatur and at Clark Atlanta University. Cynthia McKinney married Coy Grandison, a Jamaican politician. The couple had a son, Coy Jr., before divorcing.
In 1986, Billy McKinney registered his daughter as a candidate for the Georgia state house of representatives without her knowledge. McKinney lost that race to the incumbent but, without even campaigning, won 20 percent of the vote on name recognition alone. Two years later, in 1988, McKinney won election as an at-large state representative in the Georgia legislature, defeating Herb Mabry, who would later head the state AFL-CIO. The McKinneys became the first father-daughter combination to serve concurrently in the same state legislature. McKinney’s father expected her to be a close political ally, but he was soon confronted with his daughter’s political independence. “He thought he was going to have another vote,” she recalled, “but once I got there, we disagreed on everything. . . . I was a chip off the old block, a maverick.”
During the late 1980s, McKinney and other Georgia legislators pressed the U.S. Justice Department to create more majority-Black congressional districts so that African-American voters would have more equitable representation. In 1992, the Georgia legislature created two additional majority-Black districts—Georgia previously had only one—and McKinney chose to run in the sprawling 260-mile-long district that included much of DeKalb County east of Atlanta to Augusta and extended southward to the coastal city of Savannah, encompassing or cutting through 22 counties, and both inner cities and rural communities.
McKinney moved into the new district, and her father managed her campaign. In the five-way Democratic primary, McKinney used a strong grassroots network to place first, with 31 percent of the vote. In a runoff against second-place finisher George DeLoach—a funeral home director and the former mayor of Waynesboro, Georgia— McKinney won with 54 percent of the vote. In the heavily Democratic district, she defeated her Republican opponent with 73 percent of the vote. Reflecting on an election that propelled record numbers of women and African-American candidates into congressional office, McKinney said shortly afterward, “Now we have people in Congress who are like the rest of America. It’s wonderful to have ordinary people making decisions about the lives of ordinary Americans. It brings a level of sensitivity that has not been there.”
When McKinney was sworn in to the 103rd Congress (1993–1995), she received assignments on the Committee on Agriculture and the Committee on Foreign Affairs, which was renamed International Relations the following Congress. In the 104th Congress (1995–1997) she won a spot on the Banking and Finance Committee, where she served two terms. In the 105th Congress (1997– 1999) McKinney was assigned to the National Security Committee, which was renamed Armed Services the following Congress.
McKinney was part of a newly elected vanguard of Black Congresswomen, many from the South, who emerged from state legislatures onto the national political scene. She arrived on Capitol Hill after years of cultivating an unapologetic legislative style in the Georgia state house. In January 1991, she delivered a blistering speech attacking the Gulf War and President George H.W. Bush: two-thirds of the legislators in the Georgia statehouse left the chamber after McKinney called the military action “the most inane use of American will that I have witnessed in a very long time.” She added, “America must be willing to fight injustice and prejudice at home as effectively as America is ready to take up arms to fight ‘naked aggression’ in the international arena.” In 1995, she infuriated House Republican leaders when she suggested that an independent counsel investigate Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia for violating the chamber’s gift rules because he accepted free air time on cable television to broadcast a college course. In 2000, McKinney accused Vice President Albert Gore Jr. of having a “low Negro tolerance level” for not having more African- American agents on his security detail. She later claimed the remark was part of a draft press release not intended for public distribution, but she did push the William J. Clinton administration to investigate charges of discrimination in the Secret Service.
In the House, McKinney advocated for poor and working-class Americans and spoke out on issues ranging from human rights abuses abroad to social inequities at home. She also opposed federal efforts to restrict access to abortions—particularly a long-standing measure known as the Hyde amendment that largely eliminated Medicaid coverage for abortions. In a debate on the House Floor, McKinney described the amendment as “nothing but a discriminatory policy against poor women, who happen to be disproportionately black.”
A court challenge shortly after McKinney’s 1994 reelection placed her at the epicenter of a national debate over the constitutionality of majority-minority districts, created to preserve the electoral power of racial and ethnic minorities in keeping with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Five White voters from the rural parts of her district—including her former opponent in the Democratic primary, George DeLoach—filed a suit claiming they had been disenfranchised because the state drew “an illegally gerrymandered district to benefit black voters,” as one plaintiff noted. McKinney said she had made great efforts to reach out to her rural constituents but that her entreaties had been met with “resistance” or “silence.” A U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1995 invalidated Georgia’s congressional district map as a “racial gerrymander” that violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. A panel of federal judges from three courts remapped Georgia’s districts before the 1996 elections, and the Black population of McKinney’s district dropped from 64 percent to about 33 percent. Although McKinney was forced to run in a majority-White district, the political network that figured heavily in her previous campaigns helped her prevail against Republican challenger John M. Mitnick, with 58 percent of the vote. McKinney subsequently won re-election twice by comfortable margins of about 60 percent. After reapportionment in 2002, African Americans made up more than 50 percent of the population in McKinney’s district.
On the International Relations Committee, where she eventually served as ranking member on the International Operations and Human Rights Subcommittee, McKinney tried to curb weapons sales to countries that violated human rights and subverted democracy. She sponsored several bills and amendments to this effect; in 1997, she partnered with California Representative Dana Rohrabacher to offer an amendment to the 1998 Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act. The amendment passed, but the bill was vetoed by President Clinton. Undeterred, McKinney continue to push for an arms transfer code of conduct without success. In 2000, she voted against granting full trade relations with China, citing Beijing’s poor human rights record. McKinney frequently challenged American foreign policy during this period, including American intervention in Kosovo, long-standing U.S. sanctions against Iraq, and much of U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, McKinney made several statements that drew criticism from colleagues, the media, and constituents. First, when New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani rejected a donation for the victims of the attacks from a wealthy Saudi prince who claimed the September 11 attacks were a response to U.S. policies in the Middle East, McKinney offered to accept the money instead to combat poverty in her district. Then, in a 2002 radio interview, McKinney suggested that officials in the George W. Bush administration had prior knowledge about the attacks but remained silent because they stood to gain financially from military spending on a new war in the region. Alluding to the still-contentious recount of votes in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, and the Supreme Court ruling that resulted in Bush’s presidency, McKinney said, “an administration of questionable legitimacy has been given unprecedented power.”
In the 2002 Democratic primary, McKinney faced Denise L. Majette, an African-American former state judge who had never run for office. Majette’s campaign tried to draw a stark contrast between her decade of work as a judge with McKinney’s mounting list of controversial comments, with particular emphasis on her statements regarding the September 11 attacks. McKinney’s support for an independent Palestine drew national attention to the race, as Majette received significant backing from individuals and organizations that supported the close relationship between the United States and Israel. Some of McKinney’s Jewish constituents were so frustrated by her stance that they sought to be moved into the district of neighboring Representative John Lewis during the 2002 redistricting. Majette took advantage of the open primary, benefiting from a coordinated effort by Republicans to vote for her in favor of McKinney. Majette amassed a two-to-one fundraising advantage and prevailed by a 58 to 42 percent margin in the primary before winning the general election.
Two years later, when Majette made an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate, McKinney entered the race to reclaim her old congressional seat. She won the Democratic primary with 54 percent of the vote. McKinney took advantage of her name recognition and backing from the Congressional Black Caucus. Her understated campaign steered clear of extensive media coverage and, as in her earlier runs for Congress, relied on a vigorous grassroots effort and focused on local concerns, including the locations of landfills, while touting her opposition to the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. McKinney won the general election to the 109th Congress (2005–2007) with 64 percent of the vote against Republican Catherine Davis. McKinney regained her assignment on the Armed Services Committee and picked up a seat on the Budget Committee.
Though McKinney primarily confined her legislative efforts to foreign policy, she also pursued a unique environmental agenda centered on the wildlife and public lands in her home state of Georgia. She introduced the National Forest Protection and Restoration Act three times between 1997 and 2001, which was designed to outlaw all logging and timber activities on federal public lands and allocate funding for the Environmental Protection Agency to investigate alternatives to wood for paper and construction. In 2002, she introduced the Public Lands Forever Wild Act, which set limits on development and prioritized a return to “natural conditions” on public lands. She submitted the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Act four times during her final two nonconsecutive terms in office. This bill, which established the land surrounding and including Arabia Mountain near DeKalb County in Georgia as a national heritage site, was folded into the National Heritage Areas Act which became law in 2006.
In late March 2006, McKinney allegedly hit a Capitol Hill police officer who stopped her at the entrance to one of the House office buildings and asked for identification. McKinney claimed she was a victim of racial profiling and, according to news accounts, described the police officer who stopped her as “racist.” A grand jury investigated the incident but declined to indict McKinney.