John Conyers

John James Conyers Jr. was born on the sixteenth of May 1929 at Detroit, the eldest of four sons of John Conyers Sr. — an officer of the United Automobile Workers and a vice-president of the union — and Lucille Simpson Conyers, a Detroit public-school teacher. The Conyers household was a Black working-class organising household at the centre of Detroit's UAW life. He attended the Northwestern High School of Detroit and entered Wayne State University in 1946.

He was drafted in the United States Army in 1950 and served as a combat-engineer officer in the Korean theatre from 1950 to 1957. He returned to Wayne State on his discharge and completed the bachelor's in 1957 and the LL.B. at Wayne State Law School in 1958. He served from 1958 to 1961 as a legislative assistant to the Michigan Congressman John Dingell Sr. and from 1961 to 1964 as a senior referee of the Michigan Workers' Compensation Department.

He was elected to the United States House of Representatives in November 1964 from the new Michigan Thirteenth Congressional District — at thirty-five the youngest African American member of the Eighty-Ninth Congress that took office in January 1965. He served twenty-seven consecutive terms across fifty-two years until his resignation in December 2017 — the longest tenure of any African American in the United States Congress.

He was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus in January 1971. He served as chair of the House Government Operations Committee from 1989 to 1995 and as chair of the House Judiciary Committee from 2007 to 2011 — the first African American to chair the Judiciary Committee. He chaired the Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice through the principal post-Watergate-era criminal-justice oversight investigations.

He introduced in January 1989 House Resolution 40 — calling for a federal commission to study slavery reparations — and re-introduced it every Congress thereafter until his retirement. He was the principal congressional sponsor of the 1983 Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday legislation.

He resigned in December 2017 following the disclosure of multiple workplace-harassment settlement allegations from former staff.

He died at Detroit on the twenty-seventh of October 2019, at ninety.

He is honored here as the longest-serving African American member of Congress.