Marcia L Fudge - Infinite Women

Born: 29 October 1952, 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).

In 2008, Marcia L. Fudge won election to the U.S. House of Representatives after a career as an administrator and local elected official. Representing one of the poorest districts in the country, Fudge’s legislative agenda focused on improving nutrition, education, health care, agriculture, and voting rights, and sought to ensure that the federal government provided support and protection for poor and working-class Americans. Fudge implored her colleagues in Congress to “talk more about how we lift people out of poverty.”

Marcia L. Fudge was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 29, 1952. Fudge’s parents were divorced, and she lived with her mother, Marian Saffold, a lab technician and union organizer. Fudge’s first brush with politics came as a volunteer with the 1967 mayoral campaign for Carl Stokes, Cleveland’s first African-American mayor and brother of U.S. Representative Louis Stokes of Ohio. “Even as a kid, I thought I was an organizer,” Fudge said. She graduated from Shaker Heights High School in 1971 and earned a bachelor’s degree from The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, in 1975. She earned a law degree from the Cleveland Marshall School of Law at Cleveland State University in 1983. While studying law, Fudge clerked for municipal judge Stephanie Tubbs Jones whom she met through their membership in the same sorority.

After law school, Fudge worked in the Cuyahoga County government as director of its budget commission and personal property tax department. In the 1990s, Fudge went back to work as finance director for Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who was serving as Cuyahoga County prosecutor at the time. When Jones was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1998, Fudge joined her in Washington as chief of staff. In 2000, Fudge returned to Ohio and was elected the first African American and the first woman to serve as mayor of Warrensville Heights. She held the mayor’s office for two terms.

Jones died suddenly in August 2008 during her fifth term in the House, and because she had already won the Democratic nomination for the election that fall, the district’s Democratic executive committee was responsible for appointing a candidate to take her place in the general election. Fudge campaigned for the nomination, calling upon members of the committee to submit her name. On September 11, 2008, committee members selected Fudge as their candidate. Because Jones’s death also created a vacancy in the final months of the 110th Congress (2007–2009), Fudge also declared her candidacy for the special election to serve out the remainder of the term. In October 2008, Fudge won the nomination for the special election to the 110th Congress with 67 percent of the vote. Ohio’s Eleventh District was majority Black and, at the time, encompassed downtown Cleveland and its eastern suburbs. Fudge won election to the 111th Congress (2009–2011) with 85 percent of the vote, and two weeks later, she won a special election to serve out the final six weeks of the 110th Congress. Fudge won her next five re-elections with no less than 79 percent of the vote, maintaining close relationships in her district and writing a regular “Congresswoman’s Corner” column in the Call & Post, Cleveland’s weekly African-American newspaper.

Upon winning election, Fudge asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California for assignments to the Financial Services and Education and Labor Committees. Fudge was granted the latter request alongside a seat on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee in the 111th Congress. When Democrats entered the minority in the 112th Congress (2011–2013), Fudge moved to the Committee on Agriculture and remained on Science, Space, and Technology. Fudge left the Science, Space, and Technology committee mid-Congress to fill a vacancy on the newly renamed Education and the Workforce Committee in the 112th Congress. When Democrats regained the majority in 2019, Fudge joined the Committee on House Administration and chaired its Subcommittee on Elections, as well as the Agriculture Committee’s Subcommittee on Nutrition, Oversight, and Department Operations.

Throughout Fudge’s congressional career, she prioritized access to quality education. In 2015, as a member of the conference committee for the first reauthorization in 13 years of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Fudge worked to protect federal funding for school districts with low-income students and advocated for “the equitable allocation of resources to schools.” In the 116th Congress (2019–2021), she pushed to improve college affordability as Congress prepared to reauthorize the Higher Education Act. In 2018 and 2019, Fudge introduced the Strength in Diversity Act to distribute grants to fund local educational programs to increase diversity in schools. The first bill never received a floor vote, but a more receptive Democratic majority approved the bill in the 116th Congress, though the Republican-controlled Senate failed to vote for it.

On the Agriculture Committee, Fudge worked to protect and expand nutrition programs and improve access to healthy foods. In the 111th Congress, she sponsored a successful resolution to designate September as Childhood Obesity Awareness Month. In 2014 and 2018, Fudge sat on the conference committee to finalize the massive farm bill. She advocated for provisions that avoided cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—which provides federal aid for food for those in need—and expanded access to healthy foods. “Programs that affect child nutrition,” Fudge said, were “essential tools in the fight to end child hunger.” She also pushed to allow disadvantaged farmers to access to grants and loans through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In the 116th Congress, Fudge sponsored the Farm to School Act, which sought to supply America’s schools with healthy foods grown locally by veteran and disadvantaged farmers. She also introduced the School MEALS Act to expand access to school nutrition programs. Neither bill made it out of committee.

Fudge was elected chair of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) for the 113th Congress (2013–2015). “We call ourselves the conscience of the Congress. We focus on things that affect ‘the least of these,’ but as well, we focus on things that we think are going to move this country forward,” said Fudge. As caucus chair, Fudge challenged President Barack Obama to nominate more African Americans to his Cabinet at the start of his second term in 2013. She also pressed for more input from Black lawmakers in shaping immigration policy, citing the number of immigrants to America of African or Caribbean descent. In 2014, Fudge introduced a concurrent resolution authorizing a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the Capitol Rotunda. Speaking at the event, which included a posthumous presentation of Congressional Gold Medals to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, Fudge called the 1964 bill “one of the most significant pieces of legislation in our history.” Congress had awarded the gold medals in 2004 and they were donated to the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

In August 2014, Fudge led the CBC response to the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black man shot six times by a uniformed police officer in the St. Louis, Missouri, suburb of Ferguson. On the House Floor, CBC members criticized the local police for suppressing protests following the incident and discussed the importance of community policing. “The startling images we saw of the police response to civil protest in Ferguson, Missouri, were in stark contrast to the citizens exercising their constitutional right to be heard,” Fudge declared in early September. After the grand jury declined to indict Brown’s assailant in late November, Fudge condemned the decision as a “miscarriage of justice” that failed to provide “some reassurance that Black and brown boys’ lives do matter.”

In the summer of 2016, Fudge was selected to replace Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as permanent chair of the Democratic National Convention following controversy that stemmed from a batch of leaked emails. Although she had a prominent national platform, Fudge at times found herself at odds with party leadership in the House. Later in 2016, she backed fellow Ohio Democrat Timothy J. Ryan in his failed attempt to replace Nancy Pelosi as Democratic Leader. When Democrats regained the majority in the House following the 2018 midterm elections, Fudge considered challenging Pelosi for the Speakership. Fudge’s potential candidacy created concern within the CBC; many of its members felt a strong loyalty to Pelosi and Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, who held the third position in House Democratic leadership. Following several meetings, Pelosi arranged for Fudge to chair the House Administration Committee’s new Subcommittee on Elections. The move assured Fudge that Black women would “have a seat at the decision-making table” and led her to drop her challenge.

As chair of the Subcommittee on Elections, Fudge held field hearings across the country to examine the state of voting rights in America. Findings from the hearings were used to develop a Committee on House Administration report on what it called “the array of tactics used to suppress the votes of targeted communities.” Fudge dismissed claims of voter fraud as “a lie” and challenged the wave of voter identification laws passed around the country. “These laws are specifically designed to keep young people, the poor, the elderly and the disabled from voting,” she explained.

On December 10, 2020, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. nominated Fudge to serve as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in his administration. Although Fudge had originally campaigned to lead the Department of Agriculture, she accepted the HUD nomination. “If I can help this president in any way possible, I am more than happy to do it,” she said. “It’s a great honor and a privilege to be a part of something so good.” After being confirmed by the Senate, Fudge resigned from the House on March 10, 2021, and was sworn in as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Fudge resigned as HUD Secretary on March 22, 2024.