Retired Congressman William (Bill) Clay (D-Missouri) served in the U.S. House of Representatives for 32 years with retired U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan), who died Sunday, October 27 at age 90. Conyers was first elected to Congress in 1964, four years before Clay, and he would serve another 16 years after Clay retired in 2001.
“We were getting together many times and traveled together often,” Clay told The American about his friend. “Conyers was an icon and an inspiring figure for many young blacks seeking elected office during and long after the great marches of the 1960s.”
Conyers and Clay were two of the original cofounders of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971.
Like many others, DNC Chair Tom Perez remembered Conyers for introducing the first bill to establish the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. Clay remembered Conyers’ blood, sweat and tears over that bill in granular detail.
“The bill initially introduced by Conyers in 1968 only four days after Dr. King’s assassination failed to reach the House floor for a vote,” Clay told The American. “At the time, support for the bill was sparse and many thought its introduction merely a political gesture on Conyers’ part. Few realized that his dogged determination and persistency would build a groundswell of support for it.”
Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded Dr. King as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, started a petition drive that resulted in 800,000 signatures being presented to President Nixon – “but to no avail,” Clay said.
Conyers, joined by U.S. Senator Ed Brooke (R-Massachusetts), reintroduced the bill in 1971. “This time Rev. Abernathy secured more than 3 million signatures and personally brought them by train to the White House,” Clay said. “At one point, the corridors of the Cannon House Office Building was lined with U.S. Postal Service bags containing more than a million pieces of mail from supporters of the bill.”
Later, Clay said, Conyers and 24 other House members met with 65 mayors, urging them to make their own proclamations and to engage in their own January 15 celebrations. Shortly thereafter, Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York , and John Lindsay, mayor of New York City, organized celebrations for state and city employees. The mayor of St. Louis and the governor of Maine also proclaimed the date a holiday and arranged for appropriate tributes to Dr. King.
In 1980, the bill fell a mere five votes short of passage. “We were short a few votes,” Clay remembered Conyers saying. “But I think the momentum that builds up every year around King is sincere and genuine across America.”
By the time of final passage of the bill in 1983, 10 states and the District of Columbia had legally established January 15 as the Dr. King holiday. “However,” Clay said, “for nine consecutive years, the Georgia legislature refused to enact a bill declaring a holiday in honor its native son, the most celebrated crusader of freedom and justice in the state’s history.”
When Clay retired in 2001, he was the longest-serving black to retire in the 130 years that African Americans had served in Congress. At that time, Conyers was the longest-serving African-American member of Congress and would eclipse his friend’s record when he retired in 2017.
Conyers – like U.S. Rep. Louis Stokes (D-Ohio) and U.S. Rep. Robert N.C. Nix Sr. (D-Pennsylvania) – was rare for an African American in being elected to Congress without previously having held an elective office.
He and Clay were in the first wave of blacks elected to Congress in the cities where they were born, as were U.S. Rep. Charles Diggs (D-Michigan), Shirley Chisholm (D-New York) and George W. Collins (D-Illinois). Their predecessors like U.S. Rep. Oscar De Priest, U.S. Rep. Arthur Mitchell and U.S. Rep. William Dawson all were born in the South but elected to Congress after migrating north.
For all of his personal connections to the deceased, Clay is most proud of Conyers’ legislative legacy. “I am proud of the record he established,” Clay said, “especially in promoting and defending the rights of minorities, woman and average workers.”
