Had US Congress listened to Cynthia McKinney would America today be in such a policy demise?

Reading Ain’t nothing like freedom, the 2013 autobiography by Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, one cannot but remain perplexed at how her spot-on insights and policy decisions, while serving in Congress, were ignored by her fellow politicians. Had Congress at the time listened to McKinney’s many topics she battled, both on an internal as well as foreign policy level, American politics would maybe today not be so void of content or vision.

Cynthia McKinney was born on 17 March 1955 in Atlanta, Georgia, to Leola Christion McKinney, a nurse, and James Edward “Billy” McKinney, a police officer, civil rights activist, and longtime legislator in the Georgia state house of representatives.

McKinney undertook graduate studies in International Relations at the University of Southern California and Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. In 1984, she served as a diplomatic fellow at Spelman College in Atlanta. Subsequently she taught political science at Agnes Scott College in Decatur and at Clark Atlanta University. McKinney joined her father in the Georgia Legislature in 1988. She went on to serve as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives where she represented Georgia’s 11th and 4th Congressional Districts as a Democrat for six terms (1993–2003 and 2005–2007).

In Ain’t nothing like freedom she recalls episodes from her father’s life: “upon his return to Georgia from the European war theater, while still wearing his US Army uniform, Billy was arrested for drinking from the “White Only” water fountain.” James Edward McKinney then joined the Atlanta Police Department in 1948 as one of its first African-American officers. He also held a one-man protest, picketing the Atlanta police department headquarters on his days off, protesting that Black policemen were not allowed to arrest Whites.^[i] One often forgets what segregation meant and these few details reawaken a dark era of American history whose consequences often still need addressing.

While in office Cynthia McKinney sought shared values beyond racial diversity. When McKinney started District Days at the various County Courthouses to meet directly with her constituents, she noticed that her black constituents would not show up and realized it was due to the fact that County Courthouses had been the place were racial violence via lynching were either consented to or actually carried out.

McKinney remembers that while working on the House Agricultural Committee and organizing a trip to Washington for Georgia’s farmers, only black farmers from her district showed up; yet when weeks later a drought hit the area white farmers did seek her help and were astonished at her willingness in helping them. They admitted that a misplaced racial prejudice had caused them to boycott her trip for the regions’ farmers to Washington.

Cynthia McKinney was a central figure and the driving force in several key hearings during her time as the Ranking Member of the House International Relations Committee. She dedicated a lot of her attention to the instability in the Great Lakes region, and recognizing early on that Rwanda 1990-1994 was actually a US regime change and Paul Kagame a US puppet. McKinney soon became aware, cutting through the hefty propaganda, also espoused by many NGOs, of the US role in both the Rwandan genocide, as well as the subsequent US backed invasion of Congo, a genocide that today is on-going and is considered the worst in terms of human suffering and deaths since World War II: since 1996 12 million Congolese have perished due to this US backed invasion via its proxies Rwanda and Uganda. McKinney addressed a letter to President Bill Clinton as early as 31 August 1999 calling out his fake “African Renaissance” posturing : “your failure to intervene and stop the illegal invasion of the Democratic Republic of Congo by your allies, Uganda and Rwanda, has directly led to the commission of crimes against humanity by their troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” ^[ii]Having personally met then Congolese President Laurent-Désiré Kabila, she was told by him that he feared for his life: he was assassinated in 2001 for not bending to the US pressure to balkanize his country and hand over the mineral rich east to Rwanda and Uganda. Today, in a historical void, US foreign policy continues its deception in pretending to broker a peace deal.

The four hearings McKinney organized on the Great Lakes region are crucial for understanding the conflict-ridden region today.

While serving on the House Armed Service committee she was the only representative in Congress to vote no each year on the Pentagon’s budget. To her surprise when she first joined the committee, she called the committee staff in to ask them to go over the budget authorization bill, and realized that no one really wanted to and that such requests were rare. McKinney did not shy away from questioning in 2006 of then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on the Pentagon’s loss of trillion of unaccounted dollars or its contracts with corporations that smacked of conflict of interest, some also with dubious human rights records. When looking into the war in Sudan she suggested legislation that would delist US corporations from the stock exchange if they were found to be complicit in human rights abuses.

McKinney at the time held the only Congressional briefing critical of the 9/11 victim’s flawed conclusions and faulty recommendations. Nearly three years into the latest Palestinian genocide it is interesting to note that Cynthia McKinney is the only former U.S. Congresswoman to have sailed on a flotilla for Palestine. The first mission to break the naval blockade of Gaza by the Free Gaza Movement was in August 2008. In December of that year, during Operation Cast Lead, McKinney boarded the SS Dignitywhich was attacked by the Israeli Navy. She was aboard the Spirit of Humanity in June 2009 when it was intercepted and she was detained and deported by Israeli authorities. She wrote an open letter to President Barak Obama asking him to not remain silent, which she saw as a form of complicity, and to directly negotiate with Hamas, who were the legitimate elected Palestinian representatives. She underscored the Palestinian right to resist occupation as per the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

McKinney, whose suitcase was packed with crayons for Gaza’s desperate children, wrote a letter from an Israeli prison on 2 July 2009: “Zionism has surly run of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else’s children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza’s children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.” ^[iii]

McKinney was also part of the Bertrand Russell tribunal on Palestine which began in 2011 in Cape Town South Africa, and can be read with hindsight as a harbinger of South Africa’s genocide complaint to the International Court of Justice in December 29, 2023.

On 8 June 2026 Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) delivered a speech on the House floor regarding the U.S.S. Liberty incident calling for an investigation into the 8 June 1967 incident, incident that McKinney had mentioned to CNN following her first attempted voyage to Gaza in December 2008-yet it was censored at the time.

In May 2011 she took a delegation of observers to Libya to monitor NATO’s purported humanitarian intervention during the bombing of Tripoli. The book The Illegal war on Libya published in 2012 was thus a first-person testimony of the crimes committed by the US and its NATO allies^[iv]. McKinney not only spoke about injustices, but showed up even at the risk of her life.

On internal policies McKinney had much to say on vote rigging, the ineffectiveness of electronic voting, the state of homelessness and veterans, viable wages, corporate responsibility, environmental issues, the growing uncontrolled influence of Zionist special interest groups in US politics -all issues which her autobiography foreshadow and that are exploding today.

McKinney also ran as a presidential candidate for the Green party in 2008. Her acceptance remarks to the Green Party Convention in Chicago on 12 July 2008 is a blueprint of what US policies would need today, as well as her appropriate outrage: “Only a sick government would place a banker in-between a student and her teacher. An insurance lobbyist in-between a patient and his doctor. Lying and spying before 9/11 Truth and the Constitution. Only a sick government would place a wealthy family and their huge corporation and its genetically-modified Frankenfood peddled by force in-between us and the organic food that’s healthy for us to eat and that farmers would prefer to grow.” ^[v]

McKinney underscores that brining positive change also means being aware of what she defines the tree shakers that acted before one’s time as well as working with the contemporary ones. Martin Luther King Jr was one of her role models, whose speeches she would often listen to when facing harassment for speaking out. Her contemporary tree shakers, many whistleblowers, were her inspiration and her partners in speaking truth to power, in her words speaking truth to power so as to empower.

She saw a main key for change is organizing on all levels, a strategy still criticized by American intellectuals and politicians. She was often alone in Congress taking stances, whether at anti-war protests or at the reenactment of the attempted Gretna city bridge crossing, highlighting the inadequate attention given to the events during and following hurricane Katrina. Although she recalls Nancy Pelosi had prohibited democrats from participating in the Select Committee on Katrina, McKinney not only participated but also requested to put together her own hearing. Disturbing facts emerged about “selective evacuation, police taunting of children with lasers and guns, and murder on the Danziger bridge”, as well as police activity which had denied the survivors the opportunity to flee the floodwaters.^[vi] She introduced important Katrina-related legislation such as taking away federal funding for a year from any law enforcement agency that was involved in the turnaround of Katrina survivors seeking to escape the floodwaters. She began an investigation in her own office when she corroborated information that bullet-ridden bodies had been dumped by Red Cross personnel in the bayous of Louisiana. The investigation was stopped once she left office.

She was aware of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s use of tactics such as “expose, disrupt, or otherwise neutralize” opponents in what became known as the COINTELPRO program. It had been used at the time as a tool of repression against Black Power, antiwar, “New Left,” Puerto Rican independence, and American Indian movements.^[vii] McKinney suggests that “all high school and college students write at least one research paper on COINTELPRO, so that they can understand the extent to which a self-professed “democratic” government will go to limit dissent and silence courageous, but inconvenient, truth tellers.”^[viii] Power abuse on the part of US intelligence agencies is a major threat to US politics today. Reading Ain’t nothing like freedom should also be a part of American educational curricula.

Notes:

^[i] Cynthia McKinney, Ain’t nothing like freedom, Clarity Press Inc, Atlanta, 2013. p 214

^[ii] Ibidem Letter to President Bill Clinton Appendix 1 p. 236

^[iii] Ibidem p. 203

^[iv] Cynthia McKinney et al. The Illegal War on Libya, Clarity Press Inc., 2012.

^[v] Cynthia McKinney, Ain’t nothing like freedom, p 173

^[vi] Ibidem P 64-65

^[vii] Foreword by Cynthia McKinney in Mark Schuller, Humanity’s Last Stand, Rutgers University Press, 2021.

^[viii] Cynthia McKinney, Ain’t nothing like freedom p 219