Longtime U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who helped lead federal efforts to protect women from domestic violence and recognize Juneteenth as a national holiday, has died. She was 74. Photo: Internet Source

Lillie Conley, her chief of staff, confirmed that Jackson Lee, who had pancreatic cancer, died in Houston Friday night with her family around her.

The Democrat had represented her Houston-based district and the nation’s fourth-largest city since 1995. She had previously had breast cancer and announced the pancreatic cancer diagnosis on June 2.

“The road ahead will not be easy, but I stand in faith that God will strengthen me,” Jackson Lee said in a statement then.

Jackson Lee was “a towering figure in our politics,” President Joe Biden said in a statement Saturday. “Always fearless, she spoke truth to power and represented the power of the people of her district in Houston with dignity and grace.”

Vice President Kamala Harris called her a dear friend for many years, as well as a fellow member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and the Congressional Black Caucus.

“She was relentless—one of our nation’s fiercest, smartest, and most strategic leaders in the way she thought about how to make progress happen. There was never a trite or trivial conversation with the Congresswoman. She was always fighting for the people of Houston and the people of America,” her statement said.

Bishop James Dixon, a longtime friend in Houston who visited Jackson Lee earlier this week, said he will remember her as a fighter.

“She was just a rare, rare jewel of a person who relentlessly gave everything she had to make sure others had what they needed. That was Sheila,” he said.

Jackson Lee had just been elected to the Houston district once represented by Barbara Jordan, the first Black woman elected to Congress from a Southern state since Reconstruction, when she was immediately placed on the high-profile House Judiciary Committee in 1995.