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.”1
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.2
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.”3
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.4
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.”5
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.6
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.”7
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.8
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.9
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.”10
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.11
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.12
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 2006.13
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.14
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