WASHINGTON – NOVEMBER 15: Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) arriving for his House of Representatives ethics committee hearing in the Longworth House Office Building November 15, 2010 in Washington, DC.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Charles Rangel, the Democratic former congressman from New York who championed his Harlem community on Capitol Hill for almost five decades, died Monday, his family said.
He was 94.
City College of New York spokesperson Michelle Stent confirmed Rangel’s death in a statement, saying he died at a hospital in New York.
Politicians and supporters remembered Rangel, known as Charlie, for his years in public service and deep roots in New York City. He was born in Harlem and was first elected to Congress in 1970, representing a congressional district that was first drawn up in the 1940s and allowed the neighborhood’s majority Black voters to send one of their own to Washington.
Rangel served for so long that he earned the nickname the “Lion of Lenox Avenue,” referring to one of Harlem’s primary corridors.
“Charlie Rangel was a great man, a great friend, and someone who never stopped fighting for his constituents and the best of America,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Monday on X. “The list of his accomplishments could take pages, but he leaves the world a much better place than he found it.”
New York Mayor Eric Adams said on X that he was “sad to lose a dear friend and exemplary model of devotion and courage.” The Rev. Al Sharpton called Rangel a “trailblazing legislator and an unshakable force in American politics.”
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo also honored Rangel as his “mentor and friend.”
“He had that Harlem fire in his heart and a joy in his soul that no battle could extinguish,” Cuomo said in a statement, adding that “he never forgot where he came from.”
Rangel, a veteran of the Korean War, was a high school dropout but eventually went to college on the G.I. Bill, getting degrees from New York University and St. John’s University Law School.
In 1970, he defeated legendary Harlem politician Adam Clayton Powell to start his congressional career. During the next 40-plus years, he became a legend himself — a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, dean of the New York congressional delegation and, in 2007, the first Black chair of the influential Ways and Means Committee.
“I have always been committed to fighting for the little guy,” Rangel said in 2012.
Two years earlier, he had stepped down from the Ways and Means Committee amid an ethics cloud. The House would later censure him in a 333-79 vote, citing nearly a dozen ethics violations that included breaching a gifts ban, improper use of influence and failure to disclose income.
After the censure, Rangel rose before his colleagues in sorrow.
“I know in my heart I am not going to be judged by this Congress,” he said. “I’ll be judged by my life in its entirety.”
Rangel remained in Congress and won the 2012 primary. His Harlem district overwhelmingly voted him in again as Barack Obama won a second presidential term.
Despite the political stain later in his career, his time in Congress was exceedingly busy.
According to the City College statement, Rangel sponsored 40 bills and resolutions that became law. His significant legislative accomplishments include championing the national Empowerment Zone program, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and the Affordable Care Act, which Obama signed into law in 2010.
Rangel was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee when the Affordable Care Act was being heavily debated in Congress, and he was under pressure from the ethics investigations.
In a 2009 interview with Time, he was defiant when he was asked about his legacy.
“Well, as Rhett Butler once said in ‘Gone With the Wind,’ if I’m gone, quite frankly, I don’t give a damn,” he told the magazine.
Rangel served in Congress until 2017, when he retired. He lamented to The New York Times in 2016, when his eventual successor, Rep. Adriano Espaillat, was poised to become the first Dominican American elected to Congress, that he feared that meant his Harlem district would no longer have a Black representative.
“Can you tell the people in Boston that some day you won’t have an Irish congressman?” Rangel said.
Rangel was the last surviving member of the so-called Gang of Four — a group of Black political figures who wielded great power in city and state politics. The others were David Dinkins, New York’s first Black mayor; Percy Sutton, who was Manhattan Borough president; and Basil Paterson, a deputy mayor and New York secretary of state.
The Congressional Black Caucus said in a statement Monday that its 61 members were mourning the loss of Rangel.
“His legacy is one of tireless advocacy, historic firsts, and dedication to justice and equality,” the caucus said. “May he rest in power and everlasting peace.”
Rangel is preceded in death by his wife, Alma, a social worker whom he met in a Harlem ballroom in the 1950s; she died in 2024. The couple shared two children.
