Cynthia Ann McKinney (born March 17, 1955) is a U.S. politician and a member of the Green Party since 2007. As a member of the Democratic Party, she served six terms as a member of the United States House of Representatives. In 2008, the Green Party nominated McKinney for President of the United States. She is the first African-American woman to have represented Georgia in the House.
In the 1992 election, McKinney was elected in the newly re-created 11th District, and was re-elected in 1994. When her district was redrawn and renumbered due to the Supreme Court of the United States ruling in Miller v. Johnson , McKinney was easily elected from the new 4th District in the 1996 election, and was re-elected twice without substantive opposition.
McKinney was defeated by Denise Majette in the 2002 Democratic primary, in part due to Republican crossover voting in Georgia's open primary election, which permits anyone from any party to vote in any party primary, and in part due to her "controversial profile, which included a suggestion that president George W. Bush knew in advance of the September 11 attacks."
After her 2002 loss, McKinney traveled and gave speeches, and served as a Commissioner in The Citizens' Commission on 9-11. On October 26, 2004, she was among 100 prominent Americans and 40 family members of those who were killed on 9/11 who signed the 9/11 Truth Movement statement, calling for new investigations of what they perceived as unexplained aspects of the 9/11 events. McKinney was re-elected to the House in November 2004, following her successor's run for Senate. In Congress, she advocated unsealing records pertaining to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and an investigation into the murder of Tupac Shakur and continued to criticize the Bush Administration over the 9/11 attacks. She supported anti-war legislation and introduced articles of impeachment against President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
She was defeated by Hank Johnson in the 2006 Democratic primary, after finding herself in the national spotlight again over the March 29, 2006, Capitol Hill police incident, where she was involved in a confrontation with a Capitol Hill Police officer who did not recognize her as a member of congress. She left the Democratic Party in September 2007.
Members of the United States Green Party had attempted to recruit McKinney for their ticket in both 2000 and 2004. She eventually ran as the Green Party nominee in the 2008 presidential election.
Early life and political career
Cynthia McKinney was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the daughter of Billy McKinney, a law enforcement officer and former Georgia State Representative and of Leola McKinney, a retired nurse.
McKinney was exposed to the Civil Rights Movement through her father, an activist who regularly participated in demonstrations across the south. As a police officer, he challenged the discriminatory policies of the Atlanta Police Department, publicly protesting in front of the station, often carrying young McKinney on his shoulders. He became a state representative, and McKinney attributes her father's election victory after several failed attempts to the passage of the Voting Rights Act passed by Lyndon B. Johnson.
McKinney earned a B.A. in international relations from the University of Southern California, an M.A. in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She worked as a high school teacher and later as a university professor.
Her political career began in 1986 when her father, a representative in the Georgia House of Representatives, submitted her name as a write-in candidate for the Georgia state house. She got about 40% of the popular vote, despite the fact that she lived in Jamaica at the time with then-husband Coy Grandison (with whom she had a son, Coy McKinney, born in 1985). In 1988, McKinney ran for the same seat and won, making the McKinneys the first father and daughter to simultaneously serve in the Georgia state house.
In 1991, she spoke aggressively against the Gulf War, causing many legislators to walk out in protest of her remarks.
In 2007, McKinney moved from her long time residence in the Atlanta suburb of Stone Mountain to California. She is a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley.
First terms in Congress
In the 1992 election, McKinney was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as the member of Congress from the newly created 11th District, a 64% black district spanning from Atlanta to Savannah. She was the first African American woman to represent Georgia in the House. She was re-elected in 1994.
In 1995 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Miller v. Johnson that the 11th District was an unconstitutional gerrymander because the boundaries were drawn based on the racial composition of the constituents. McKinney's district was subsequently renumbered as the 4th and redrawn to take in almost all of DeKalb County, prompting outrage from McKinney. She asserted that it was a racially-discriminatory ruling, given the fact that the Supreme Court had previously ruled that Texas's 6th District, which is 91 percent white, was constitutional.
The new 4th, however, was no less Democratic than the 11th, and McKinney was easily elected from this district in 1996. She was re-elected two more times with no substantive opposition.
On October 17, 2001, McKinney introduced a bill calling for "the suspension of the use, sale, development, production, testing, and export of depleted uranium munitions pending the outcome of certain studies of the health effects of such munitions. . . ." The bill was cosponsored by Reps. Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, Puerto Rico; Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis.; Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio; Barbara Lee, D-Ca.; and Jim McDermott, D-Wash.
Criticism of Al Gore
During the 2000 presidential campaign, McKinney wrote that "Al Gore's Negro tolerance level has never been too high. I've never known him to have more than one black person around him at any given time." Gore's campaign pointed out that its manager, Donna Brazile, was black.
McKinney also chastised Gore for failing to support the U'wa people of Colombia trying to oppose petroleum drilling near them. In a press release issued on February 22, 2000, entitled "No More Blood For Oil" McKinney wrote that "Oil drilling on Uwa land will result in considerable environmental damage and social conflict which will lead to greater militarization of the region as well as an increase in violence." Addressing herself to Gore, she wrote "I am contacting you because you have remained silent on this issue despite your strong financial interests and family ties with Occidental."
September 11 attacks
McKinney gained national attention for remarks she made following the 2001 US attacks, charging that the United States had advance knowledge of the attacks and that US President George W. Bush may have been aware of the incipient attack and allowed them to happen, allegedly due to his father's business interests: "It is known that President Bush's father, through the Carlyle Group, had–at the time of the attacks–joint business interests with the bin Laden construction company and many defense industry holdings, the stocks of which have soared since September 11." In the month that followed the attacks, when New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani refused to cash a $10 million check written by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal in light of the Prince's suggestion that the attacks were an indication that the United States "should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause," McKinney published an open letter to the Saudi Prince, in which she wrote of her disappointment at Giuliani's action and stated, "Let me say that there are a growing number of people in the United States who recognize, like you, that U.S. policy in the Middle East needs serious examination...Your Royal Highness, many of us here in the United States have long been concerned about reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that reveal a pattern of excessive, and often indiscriminate, use of lethal force by Israeli security forces in situations where Palestinian demonstrators were unarmed and posed no threat of death or serious injury to the security forces or to others."
2002 primary defeat
In 2002, McKinney was defeated in the Democratic primary by DeKalb County judge Denise Majette. It was stunning by itself that Majette, who had never run in a partisan contest before, was able to unseat the seemingly entrenched McKinney. Majette defeated McKinney with 58% of the vote to McKinney's 42%.
McKinney protested the result in court, claiming that thousands of Republicans, knowing they had no realistic chance of defeating her in the November general election, had voted in the Democratic primary against McKinney in revenge for her anti-Bush administration views and her allegations of voter fraud in Florida in the 2000 Presidential Election. Like 20 other states, Georgia operates an open primary: voters do not align with a political party when they register to vote and may participate in whichever party's primary election they choose. Thus, relying on the Supreme Court's decision in California Democratic Party v. Jones , which had held that California's blanket primary violated the First Amendment (despite the fact that the Court explicitly differentiated&
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