CONYERS, John, Jr.

CONYERS, John, Jr., A Representative from Michigan; born in Detroit, Wayne County, Mich., May 16, 1929; attended Detroit public schools; B.A., Wayne State University, Detroit, Mich., 1957; LL.B., Wayne State Law School, Detroit, Mich., 1958; lawyer, private practice; Michigan National Guard, 1948-1950; United States Army, 1950-1954; United States Army Reserve, 1954-1957; staff, United States Representative John D. Dingell, Jr., of Michigan, 1958-1961; general counsel for three labor locals in Detroit, 1959-1964; executive board member, Detroit, Mich., American Civil Liberties Union, 1964-2019; executive board member, Detroit, Mich., NAACP, 1963-2019; referee for Michigan workmen’s compensation department, 1961-1963; elected as a Democrat to the Eighty-ninth and to the twenty-six succeeding Congresses until his resignation on December 5, 2017 (January 3, 1965-December 5, 2017); one of the managers appointed by the House of Representatives in 1988 to conduct the impeachment proceedings against Alcee Lamar Hastings, judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida; chairman, Committee on Government Operations (One Hundred First through One Hundred Third Congresses); chairman, Committee on the Judiciary (One Hundred Tenth and One Hundred Eleventh Congresses); died on October 27, 2019, in Detroit, Mich.; interment at Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery, Warren, Mich.

View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress

John Conyers Jr. of Michigan served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 52 years—which, at the time of his retirement, amounted to nearly one-fifth of the House’s existence. During his career he set a number of milestones. He was the first African American to serve on the Judiciary Committee. He was one of a handful of African-American Members to head two standing committees: Government Operations and then Judiciary. And in his fiftieth year of service, he became the first African-American Dean of the House, the Member with the longest continuous service. Conyers pursued an ambitious domestic agenda in Congress, including a commission on reparations for descendants of enslaved Black Americans; universal, single-payer health care; and criminal justice. “I have been a champion of justice for the oppressed and the disenfranchised. I have never wavered in my commitment to justice and democracy,” Conyers said during his farewell address to the House.¹

The eldest of four brothers, John Conyers Jr. was born in Detroit, Michigan, on May 16, 1929, to John and Lucille Conyers. His father was an auto worker and an official for the United Automobile Workers union. His father’s work with the union spurred Conyers’s interest in politics. “I was drawn to the struggle because my dad was a labor organizer,” he recalled. Conyers attended Detroit public schools and graduated from Northwestern High School in 1947. He served in the National Guard from 1948 to 1950 before enlisting in the U.S. Army and attending officer candidate school. Conyers was commissioned a second lieutenant with the Army Corps of Engineers and served in Korea on combat duty for a year. In 1954, he was honorably discharged and served three more years in the Army Reserves. Taking advantage of the GI Bill’s educational benefits, Conyers earned a bachelor of arts from Wayne State University in 1957 and, a year later, earned a bachelor of laws from the Wayne State Law School. In June 1990, Conyers married Monica Ann Esters. They had two sons: John III and Carl. Esters launched her own political career when she won a seat on the Detroit city council in 2005.²

Conyers’s first political experience came in college, where he joined the Young Democrats and served as a precinct official for the local Democratic Party. After college, Conyers joined the staff of Michigan Representative John David Dingell Jr. as his legislative assistant from 1958 to 1961. Conyers passed the Michigan bar in 1959 and cofounded a law firm. Michigan Governor John Burley Swainson appointed him as a labor mediation referee for the Michigan workmen’s compensation department in 1961, and he also served as general counsel for several labor union locals. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy appointed Conyers to the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under the Law, which promoted racial toleration in the legal profession.³

In the early 1960s, following a series of Supreme Court rulings that codified the idea of “one man, one vote,” states were forced to reapportion their congressional districts. In Michigan the state legislature merged two House districts that stretched across a section of Detroit inhabited by White and Black middle- and upper-middleclass families. Conyers’s childhood neighborhood fell within this new jurisdiction, and he decided to run in the district’s Democratic primary in 1964. At the time of the election, the district was about 50 percent Black, though the percentage increased over the next decade. Conyers was 35 years old and struggled to secure the support of local Democratic leaders, who considered him young and inexperienced. He ran an insurgent campaign under the slogan “Jobs, Justice, and Peace,” that tapped into his labor union contacts, the Black legal community, and his opposition to the Vietnam War. In the closely contested primary Conyers defeated his opponent by 45 votes.⁴

Detroit was a heavily Democratic city, and winning the Democratic nomination was tantamount to winning the general election. That November Conyers won with 84 percent of the vote. Along with the re-election of longtime House incumbent Charles C. Diggs Jr., also from Detroit, it marked the first time that either the city or state sent two African-American Members to Congress simultaneously.⁵

Conyers served on three standing committees during his House career: the Judiciary Committee (1965–2017), becoming the first African-American Member to serve on the panel which had jurisdiction over civil rights legislation; Government Operations Committee (1971–1995), the House’s major oversight and investigative body; and the Small Business Committee (1987–1995). On Judiciary, Conyers eventually headed the Subcommittee on Crime (1973–1981) and the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice (1981–1989). In 1989, Conyers became chair of the Government Operations Committee and the panel’s Subcommittee on Legislation and National Security and served until Republicans won the House majority in 1995. That year, instead of staying on Government Operations, he chose to serve as the ranking member of Judiciary and dropped his two other committee assignments. When Democrats regained control of the House in 2007, Conyers became chair of the Judiciary Committee. After the House majority flipped again, Conyers served as the committee’s ranking member from 2011 until his retirement in 2017.⁶

Conyers arrived on Capitol Hill in 1965 amid major debates about both foreign and domestic policy. Early in his first term he expressed his opposition to U.S. military involvement overseas, becoming one of seven Members to vote against supplemental appropriations to fund military actions in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. As a new Member on the Judiciary Committee, he participated in the debate and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. By February, only a month into Conyers’s first term, more than 2,000 protesters—including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.— had been arrested in Selma, Alabama, amid voting rights demonstrations. Diggs and Conyers organized an unofficial fact-finding mission of 15 Representatives to investigate local efforts to block African Americans from registering to vote. Just days after King’s assassination in April 1968, Conyers introduced a bill for a Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. He introduced the same bill in every Congress until it became law in 1983.⁷

In 1967, because of Conyers’s work on behalf of civil rights, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was led by King, chose Conyers as recipient of the Rosa Parks Award. Parks, who had helped galvanize the modern civil rights movement after being arrested in Alabama for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus, had moved to Detroit and served in Conyers’s district office from 1965 until her retirement in 1988. When Parks died in 2005, Conyers introduced the resolution that led to Parks lying in repose in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.⁸

In 1967, Conyers played a part in deciding the fate of the House’s then-most prominent African-American Member, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York, the chair of the Education and Labor Committee. After a series of legal problems and complaints about his unpredictable committee leadership, Powell was investigated by the House Administration Committee, which determined that Powell used Education and Labor funds for private business. At the beginning of the 90th Congress (1967–1969), Conyers was appointed to a select committee headed by Emmanuel Celler of New York, the chair of the Judiciary Committee, to determine whether to sanction Powell. The select committee recommended that the House allow Powell to take his seat under the condition that he be censured, fined, and stripped of his committee seniority. Conyers filed a dissent that favored seating and censuring Powell but proposed that the House either fine the long-serving New York Democrat or strip him of his seniority, but not both. The House ultimately rejected the committee’s recommendation and decided not to seat Powell at all.⁹

As the number of Black Members increased to nine in 1969 and 12 in 1971, African-American Members of Congress looked to exert more legislative influence across Capitol Hill. In 1971, Conyers was one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), which brought together African-American legislators to work on a number of policies. Before the opening of the 92nd Congress (1971–1973), Conyers led a campaign to challenge the seating of members of the Mississippi delegation, who had supported presidential candidate and segregationist George C. Wallace of Alabama in 1968. When the Democratic Caucus decided to seat the Members-elect, Conyers led a symbolic challenge to Majority Leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma for the Speakership during the Democratic Caucus’s organizational meeting. The caucus voted 220 to 20 in favor of Albert, and Conyers gained the votes of only some of the 11 other African-American Members. Conyers’s follow-up motion to strip the Mississippi Democrats of their committee seniority failed 111 to 55—though in this case every Black Member voted for his measure. Conyers challenged Albert for Speaker again in the next Congress, accusing House Democratic leadership of “stagnation and reaction” when confronting the Republican administration of Richard M. Nixon. As in his previous attempt, Conyers lost by a wide margin, 202 to 25.¹⁰

Conyers was actively involved in the House’s oversight of the Nixon administration. In 1972, Conyers and four colleagues introduced a resolution to impeach President Nixon for the President’s escalation of the Vietnam War, which, the five Members claimed, exceeded congressional authorization. On the Judiciary Committee, Conyers also played a central role during the Watergate crisis that ended Nixon’s presidency in 1974. Conyers supported the House impeachment effort against Nixon from the start and was such a consistent opponent of the administration that he was included on Nixon’s notorious “enemies list” twice: once as an individual Member and again as a member of the CBC. When Vice President Spiro T. Agnew resigned in disgrace in 1973, President Nixon nominated House Republican Leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to serve as Vice President. Under the provisions of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, Ford’s nomination had to be approved by the House, and Conyers pushed the Judiciary Committee to act on Nixon’s impeachment before considering Ford’s nomination. Conyers’s effort to remove Nixon before confirming Ford failed, but when the Judiciary Committee later voted for three impeachment articles against Nixon in 1974, Conyers sponsored a fourth article charging Nixon with conducting an illegal and secret war in Cambodia. Conyers’s article was voted down, but the campaign to oust Nixon had its intended effect: Nixon resigned rather than risk being removed from office.¹¹

Conyers often criticized the direction of the national Democratic Party. Believing President James Earl “Jimmy” Carter to be too moderate, he endorsed Massachusetts Senator Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy in the 1980 Democratic presidential primary. In 1984 and 1988, he backed the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s bids for the Democratic presidential nomination. Conyers claimed that he had devoted more days to supporting Jackson’s 1988 campaign than any other African-American Member of the House.¹²

As the chair of the Judiciary Committee’s Crime and Criminal Justice Subcommittees, Conyers sought to redirect the priorities of federal crime fighting programs. He criticized the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which provided federal funding to state and local police departments, because LEAA grants were used to fund prison construction and police technology. Conyers believed that such funding should be redirected to crime prevention programs. Stressing the need for alternatives to mass incarceration, Conyers said, “Incarceration, especially of juveniles, virtually guarantees an individual will live a life of crime.” He introduced legislation to replace the LEAA with a Bureau of Criminal Justice Assistance. The new Bureau would award grants to fund programs to address community-based crime prevention, alternatives to traditional incarceration, juvenile delinquency, and white-collar crime. In 1988, Conyers sponsored the Racial Justice Act, which would have allowed for racial statistics of those executed by a particular jurisdiction to be taken into consideration during capital punishment cases. A similar bill passed the House as part of the 1994 crime bill but was later dropped from the final version due to Senate opposition.¹³

In 1987, the Judiciary Committee faced an unusual workload, conducting three impeachment investigations into alleged misconduct by federal judges. Rather than send all three cases to the Civil and Constitutional Rights Subcommittee, which traditionally handled impeachment issues, Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Wallace Rodino Jr. of New Jersey assigned the case of Alcee L. Hastings, an African-American U.S. judge for the Southern District of Florida, to Conyers’s Criminal Justice Subcommittee. Though Rodino made the assignment to distribute the unexpected workload, he also suspected that Conyers would be sensitive to any racist motives behind the case against Hastings. After two months reviewing files and holding hearings, Conyers’s subcommittee reported 17 articles of impeachment against Hastings, which the House adopted 413 to 3. Though Conyers admired Hastings’s judicial career, he explained, “A black public official must be held to the same standard” as any other. “A lower standard would be patronizing, a higher standard would be racist.” Conyers went on to serve as one of the House managers at Hastings’s trial before the Senate.¹⁴

In 1989, Conyers became chair of the Government Operations Committee, the premiere investigative body in the House responsible for conducting oversight of the executive branch. In 1990, following a series of scandals in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development involving fraud and the diversion of funds to supporters of the Ronald Reagan administration, Conyers sponsored a bill to require Cabinet-level and other major agencies to hire a chief financial officer to report to the Office of Management and Budget, which was tasked with creating a financial management improvement plan across the federal government.¹⁵

The Judiciary Committee again confronted the crisis of presidential impeachment while Conyers was the ranking Democrat in the 1990s. As House Republicans investigated whether President William J. Clinton had committed perjury before a federal grand jury and obstructed justice amid a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him, Conyers spearheaded the opposition and worked to prevent efforts to impeach Clinton. “This does sometimes to some people begin to take on the appearance of a coup,” he said. “It’s frightening, it’s staggering, this is not in a developing country, we’re talking about a polite, paper-exchanging, voting process in which we rip out the forty-second president of the United States.” The House eventually impeached Clinton, but the Senate did not remove him from office.¹⁶

As ranking member on Judiciary, Conyers often cooperated with his GOP counterparts. In 1996, he joined Republican Judiciary Chairman Henry John Hyde of Illinois in advancing new hate crime legislation after several African- American church burnings. Conyers managed to maintain his working relationship with Hyde even through the contentious Clinton impeachment; he and Hyde later cosponsored a measure on civil forfeitures and, in 2000, defeated a Senate bill that would have penalized newspapers for divulging classified material. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Conyers and the new Judiciary chair, Frank James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, crafted the USA PATRIOT Act, a landmark anti-terrorism bill.¹⁷

When Democrats regained the House majority in 2007—following 12 years of Republican rule—Conyers was elected chair of the Judiciary Committee after more than four decades of service on the panel. As Judiciary Committee chair, Conyers prioritized hearings to review what he believed to be an unfair disparity in criminal penalties for possession of powder cocaine and crack cocaine. Under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, mandatory minimum sentences of five years were imposed on those who possessed at least 500 grams of powder cocaine, or only five grams of crack cocaine, a cheaper substance that was more prevalent in low-income communities of color, which were disproportionately targeted by the police as a result. Conyers supported the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which raised possession limits of crack cocaine needed for mandatory minimum sentences and eliminated minimum sentences for first-time offenders. Conyers also cosponsored the Second Chance Act, a recidivism reduction measure that funded mentorship, drug treatment, and vocational training for those who had served time in prison.¹⁸

For nearly three decades, Conyers called for reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States. From 1989 to 2017, Conyers repeatedly introduced legislation to create a commission to study and develop proposals to remedy the legacy and impact of slavery and racial discrimination in the United States since 1619. In 2007, he presided over a Judiciary subcommittee hearing to consider his bill. In April 2021, a year and a half after his death, the reparations commission bill, then sponsored by Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, was approved by the committee and sent to the full House for the first time.¹⁹

Outside of his committee service, Conyers frequently introduced legislation to create a national health insurance program to provide comprehensive medical care for all Americans. “Universal health care is practiced more or less successfully in every other industrialized country,” said Conyers. “To have so many millions of people without any ability to afford health care is immoral, indefensible.”²⁰

At different times during his career, Conyers ran afoul of House ethics standards and rules. In the early 1990s, Conyers was among hundreds of Members who made overdrafts of their accounts with the House “bank,” an internal financial service managed by a House officer, which allowed Members to deposit their pay checks and provided overdraft protection for Members without penalty. Conyers’s 273 overdrafts were among the highest. Although the repeated withdrawals did not technically violate House Rules at the time, the lack of oversight and accountability generated significant public backlash and led to major institutional reforms. In November 2003, the Detroit Free Press published an extensive investigation detailing the use of Conyers’s congressional staff in political campaigns for his House races and his wife’s Detroit city council election. Following an Ethics Committee investigation, the committee reached an agreement with Conyers in December 2006 to take “a number of additional steps to ensure that his office complies with all rules and standards regarding campaign work by congressional staff.”²¹

For many years, Conyers won easy re-election to the House and showed little public interest in seeking other offices. But he surprised many when he decided to challenge Coleman A. Young for Detroit mayor in 1989. Young won the Democratic primary with 51 percent of the vote while Conyers came in third place with 18 percent. After Young retired four years later, Conyers again ran for mayor of Detroit and came in well behind with only eight percent of the primary vote.²²

Conyers experienced the closest elections of his House tenure late in his career. Beginning with the 1980 Census, Michigan began losing House seats with each reapportionment, and in 2012 Michigan’s Republican state legislature significantly redrew Conyers’s district to include communities he had never represented. In a crowded Democratic primary, opponents charged Conyers with weak constituency service, and he received a lackluster endorsement from the Detroit Free Press: “Our backing of Conyers has reflected the arc of his career: first enthusiastic, then ambivalent, and now nearly agitated as his energy and effectiveness are clearly on a downward slope.” Conyers won his primary with only 55 percent of the vote. In 2014, Conyers nearly missed appearing on the primary ballot after state and local officials ruled that many of the signatures on his campaign petition were invalid. Eventually, a federal judge ruled that Conyers could appear on the ballot, and he won the primary with 74 percent of the vote.²³

In the fall of 2017, news reports revealed that two years earlier Conyers had used funds from his congressional office in a confidentiality agreement to settle a sexual harassment charge brought by a former woman staff assistant. The disclosure came amid the #MeToo movement, as women across the country used Twitter and other media platforms to speak about their experiences as victims of sexual harassment and assault. As a result, Conyers stepped down as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee before resigning from the House on December 5, 2017. Conyers died in Detroit on October 27, 2019.²⁴

The HistoryMakers

Library of Congress
Archive of Folk Culture, American Folklife Center

Rutgers University Libraries

University of Oklahoma
The Julian P. Kanter Political Commercial Archive, Department of Communication

Wayne State University
Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs

Committee Assignments

Committee & Subcommittee Chair