Editor’s note: To read a tribute to Carrie Meek from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lucy Morgan, who accompanied Mrs. Meek on her congressional campaign trail in 1992, click here.
Much has been written about Carrie Meek, the former Florida lawmaker and one of the first Black Floridians elected to Congress since Reconstruction, in the wake of her death last week.
Mrs. Meek, who died Sunday at age 95 after a long illness, was known for her powerful oratory, frequently accompanied by the skull-and-crossbones flag she waved to signify her opposition to a bill, her championing of affirmative action, and her passionate advocacy to create economic opportunities for the poor.
What most news coverage failed to mention was that Mrs. Meek was an ardent supporter of school choice. The granddaughter of a slave whose father was a sharecropper and mother took in white families’ laundry, Mrs. Meek knew that a great education could lift out of poverty those born into it.
After graduating from a segregated Tallahassee high school, she graduated from Florida A&M University in 1946 with a degree in biology and physical education. Then, because Florida did not admit Black students to its graduate schools, she went to the University of Michigan, where in 1948 she earned a master’s degree in physical education and public health.
After leaving Congress in 2002, Mrs. Meek, a career educator, returned to Miami and turned her focus to a foundation she started a year earlier to work on education and housing issues. The Carrie Meek Foundation was among the state’s first school choice funding organizations to administer the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program.
Three organizations, including Mrs. Meek’s foundation, later became part of Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.
“Congresswoman Meek had a deep and sincere concern for the less fortunate, especially for those in her district who struggled to overcome poverty,” Step Up For Students Chairman John F. Kirtley said.
“She was unconcerned with what any party or politician would say about her supporting an educational choice program. She told me with great joy about parents coming up to her in the grocery store to thank her for their Carrie Meek Scholarship.”
Mrs. Meek’s dedication to education earned her a position at Bethune Cookman College as an instructor. She became the school’s first female basketball coach. In 1958, she returned to Florida A&M as an instructor in health and physical education, a position she held until 1961. The university named its building for Black history archives in her honor in 2007.
Mrs. Meek continued her teaching career at Miami Dade Community College as the first Black professor, associate dean, and assistant to the vice president from 1961 to 1979. She ran for the Florida House in 1978 and defeated 12 opponents.
She won a Senate seat in 1982 and in 1992 was elected to Congress. At her victory party on the night she won the Democratic nomination, which she attended with her son, Kendrick, who would later win a seat in the Florida House, she memorably told her supporters: “Congress ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Mrs. Meek retired from politics a decade later and turned her full attention to her foundation, pursuing her lifelong passion of removing educational barriers to low-income Floridians.
