In Memoriam: U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee ’75

U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a 1975 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law who championed efforts to promote equality during her 30-year career in Congress, died Friday from pancreatic cancer. She was 74.

Jackson Lee had represented Texas’ 18th District, a Democratic stronghold, since 1994, after serving on Houston’s City Council and as a municipal judge.

In Congress, she was a lead sponsor of legislation making Juneteenth a federal holiday in 2021. The date commemorates June 19, 1865, when Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, and announced that more than 250,000 enslaved Black people in the state were free.

“I thought about those slaves, who were born, lived and died, and never were honored, and never knew freedom,” Jackson Lee told TV station KHOU at a Juneteenth prayer service in Houston in 2022.

In 2015, she was a leader in the bipartisan Sentencing Reform Act, which reduced prison terms for nonviolent drug offenses and lowered other mandatory minimum sentences. In 2021, she authored legislation reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, which had expired in 2019. Other bills she introduced included those seeking fair pay for women and legislation establishing a process to expunge and seal youths’ criminal records for certain convictions. She is a founding member and co-chair of the Congressional Children’s Caucus and authored and introduced the Bullying Prevention and Intervention Act of 2013. In 2021, she sponsored a bill to create a commission to study reparations for African Americans, which advanced through the Judiciary Committee before it stalled.

She reintroduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act this year.

“With approximately 18,000 different police departments in the United States, there are no uniform standards for training, use of force, de-escalation, or even for who can be a police officer,” Jackson Lee said in a statement. “This has led to a disparity in policing methods and accountability for officer misconduct from city to city, county to county, and state to state. This is why we need the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.”

Jackson Lee was the House Democratic chief deputy whip and sat on three congressional committees, serving as a senior member of the House committees on the Judiciary, Homeland Security and the Budget. She had also served as chairwoman of the Judiciary Subcommittee for Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.

President Joe Biden called Jackson Lee “unrelenting” in her leadership.

“Always fearless, she spoke truth to power and represented the power of the people of her district in Houston with dignity and grace,” Biden said in a statement.

Her classmate John Charles Thomas ’75 was her moot court partner during their first year in law school. Thomas, who eventually became the first Black justice on the Supreme Court of Virginia, remembered Jackson Lee as having “strong sense of justice and a keen awareness of how to make the best argument based on the facts and the law.”

“Sheila was a hard worker who loved to grapple with the issues in the hypothetical cases that we were required to analyze,” Thomas said.

Even then, she was drawn to politics.

“She was inspired by Shirley Chisholm of New York who, in 1968, became the first Black woman elected to Congress,” he said.

Thomas said there were just a handful of Black law students at UVA at the time, “so we were a close-knit group who depended on each other.”

“We are saddened by Sheila’s passing, but we are proud of her lifelong dedication to making our nation a more perfect union.”

Sheila Jackson Lee in 1972, as a student at the University of Virginia School of Law, at a house party I had for law students during my first year on the faculty. I could tell then that she was really special. #SheilaJacksonLee pic.twitter.com/iohBFkMxrx

— Larry Gibson (@LarrySGibson) July 20, 2024

Born Sheila Jackson in Queens, New York, in 1950, she attended college through a New York University scholarship established after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. She then transferred to Yale University, where she met her future husband, Elwyn Lee, and earned her B.A. in political science. 

At Yale, she and Lee joined the Elihu Club, the university’s fourth-oldest senior society, where they met classmate Ronald Wesley ’75. Jackson Lee and Wesley went to law school at UVA, while Lee started his legal studies at Yale.

“Sheila was always focused and quite passionate. She was dedicated to her cause, whatever that may be,” said Wesley, who also served in the Black American Law Students Association with Jackson Lee. Though they followed separate career paths after law school, with Wesley working in private practice, the two would occasionally connect over the years. 

“Everyone was touched by this loss. People loved her, and her constituents in Houston loved her,” he said.

In an article noting where members of the Class of 1975 were working after graduation, the Virginia Law Weekly listed Jackson Lee’s employer as Wald, Harkrader & Ross in Washington, D.C. During the couple’s three years in Washington, Jackson Lee also worked for the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which investigated the deaths of King and President John F. Kennedy. 

After winning election to Congress, Jackson Lee was active, and was soon named by Congressional Quarterly as one of the 50 most effective members of Congress, a fact noted by the Virginia Law Weekly when the student newspaper announced she would deliver the 2001 commencement address for the Law School.

In Houston, where she faced only four primary challengers over 14 election cycles, Jackson Lee made a point of attending her constituents’ weddings, funerals, graduations and other key life events. Jackson Lee, who had survived breast cancer earlier in her life, took on one more political challenge in Houston in her final years, running for mayor, and losing, in 2023.

Houston congressman Al Green told NPR “she should be remembered as an advocate for her community, a spokesperson for those who were seeking justice and as a friend of those who sometimes found themselves friendless.”

Jackson Lee announced her pancreatic cancer diagnosis in June. She is survived by her husband, Elwyn Lee, an administrator at the University of Houston; her children, Erica and Jason; and two grandchildren.

Her family’s statement said her legislative victories “impacted millions.”

“However, she impacted us most as our beloved wife, sister, mother and Bebe (grandmother). She will be dearly missed, but her legacy will continue to inspire all who believe in freedom, justice and democracy.”