The original content of Democracy Now! Headlines appears under the Creative
Commons BY-NC-ND 3.0 License (United States). For more, including their other
shows and media, visit www.democracynow.org.
October 28, 2019

Longtime Michigan Congressman John Conyers Jr. Dies at 90
---------------------------------------------------------

Longtime Michigan Congressmember John Conyers Jr. has died at the age of
90. Conyers was the longest-serving African American in the history of
the U.S. Congress. Throughout his five decades as a U.S. congressmember,
he co-sponsored the original Voting Rights Act of 1965 and he helped
found the Congressional Black Caucus. He opposed the Vietnam War, the
Persian Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He also pushed for
Medicare for All and legislation to study reparations for slavery. He
spent 15 years fighting to make Martin Luther King Jr. Day a national
holiday. In 2017, Conyers resigned from Congress after multiple women
accused him of sexually harassing or groping them. This is
Congressmember Conyers speaking on Democracy Now! in 2010 about the Out
of Afghanistan Caucus, a group of lawmakers who were fighting against
the escalation of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

John Conyers: "Well, it's never been clear to me that, through war, we
can bring peace, especially when we're the invaders. We're the ones
using drones. We're causing civilian deaths to many people who would
otherwise be more friendly to us. We're creating the terrorists. This is
not being lost on most of the people in the country now. Our
constituents now want us out of both Afghanistan and Iraq. And what
we're doing now is forming a way to discuss this with our president in
an effort to make him more comfortable with doing what most people want
him to do and what we thought he was going to do in the first place -
namely is to clearly disengage from the military, increase the
diplomatic activity, and bring in some help in terms of food supplies,
aid, and positive buildup of these countries, and to make as many
friends as we can over there, rather than this ninth year of what has
now become a debacle in every respect."

That was longtime Michigan Congressmember John Conyers Jr. speaking on
Democracy Now! back in 2010. He died Sunday at his home in Detroit at
the age of 90.


.