DETROIT – John Conyers, the longest-serving African- American congressman in American history, called me a few years ago, late on a morning I happened to be in Toledo.
His voice was, as always, courtly, polite, and very distinctive. “Mr. Lessenberry, I’m having lunch with Michael Moore, and we wondered if you’d like to join us.”
I said, absolutely. Who wouldn’t want to have lunch with the famous filmmaker and the equally famous congressman?
“When?” I asked. “Right now. We’re at a restaurant in Detroit,” he said. I told him I was sorry, but I was in Ohio.
“Well, come over anyway,” he said. I’m not sure I ever made him understand why that was impossible.
John Conyers, who died in his sleep in his Detroit home last Sunday at age 90, was often a bundle of contradictions. It would be tempting to say that senility was settling in that afternoon he invited me to lunch; he was past 80.
Yet this was not new behavior; for many years, he had seemed to move in and out of lucidity. He was often capable, well into his eighties, of talking incisively about the economic problems of the poor. But when he was just 60, he was discovered one morning standing out on the median strip of a Detroit boulevard at 2 am, waving frantically to passing cars. That was in 1989, during the first of two disastrous campaigns for mayor of Detroit.
Mr. Conyers had once been a nationally admired figure, who went South to fight for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr., when that was a dangerous thing to do. When he first ran for Congress in 1964, he won the Democratic primary by a mere 108 votes.
That fall, he won an easy victory in the general election – and was reelected in the next 26 elections after that. When he went to Washington there were only five black congressmen.
Today, there are 52, and he had something to do with that. He took a national perspective from the start, and was a cofounder of the Congressional Black Caucus. He marched to his own drummer.
Even as a lowly freshman, he took on Lyndon Johnson over the Vietnam War, and refused to support funding for it. He introduced a resolution to impeach Richard Nixon – well over a year before Watergate, and earned himself a place on the famous Enemies’ List.
True, his career ended in ignominy, when he was forced to resign from office in December, 2017, after multiple former employees accused him of sexual harassment.
He never admitted any of the charges, though they seemed to be, in the words of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, “very credible.” But on his way out, he did say one reasonable thing:
He asked that he be judged by “the larger perspective of my record of service,” and that’s only fair.
John Conyers was a man who grew up in a segregated America. Detroit, the city in which he was born, was torn apart by a vicious race riot when he was only 14. His father rose to become a United Auto Workers official, but was pushed out when Walter Reuther purged the union of leftists during the Cold War.
The future congressman worked as a welder in an auto plant in Detroit while he put himself through college and law school at night. After graduation, he became an aide to a young John Dingell, who would go on to become the longest-serving congressman in our nation’s history.
John Conyers was sometimes erratic. Few of the bills he sponsored passed. But he did succeed in getting Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday made a federal holiday. He fought against racism, police brutality and the death penalty.
But though much of white America saw him as a dangerous left-wing radical, he had no use for the “black power” movement. Mr. Conyers opposed separatism, and instead told African-Americans to work within the system and register to vote. When Detroit erupted in 1967, in the worst urban riot of the decade, the young congressman drove through the area with a bullhorn, unsuccessfully asking his constituents to stop rioting and go home.
He was the only member of the House Judiciary Committee in history to consider articles of impeachment against two presidents – Richard Nixon, who he supported removing, and Bill Clinton, whose impeachment he opposed.
Had it been left up to John Conyers, there would have been a third impeachment hearing — against George W. Bush. But when the Democrats took control of the House in 2007, Speaker Pelosi told him he could become chair of the Judiciary Chair only if he agreed not to press for impeachment. Mr. Conyers agreed—but when I called him the next day, he answered his office phone with a cheery “impeachment committee!” greeting.
He had other passions, too, most notably jazz; he fought successfully to have Congress pass the Jazz Preservation Act in 1987, recognizing the music as a unique American art form.
When America was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, he had staffers in his office turn off television and put on soft jazz, John Coltraine and Charlie Parker, for the rest of the day.
Yes, Mr. Conyers stayed too long in Congress, though the voters kept him there. His office was a legendary chaotic mess, and he was always getting in trouble for outspending his staff budget, and for asking employees to baby-sit his sons or do his laundry.
But when Rosa Parks fled the south for Detroit after her famous refusal to give up her seat on the bus, John Conyers was the only one who reached out and gave the former seamstress a job.
He was flawed, yes. But he lived in an age of giants, and wasn’t afraid to speak what he thought was truth to supreme power.
We are unlikely to see his like again.
