Hakeem Jeffries

1970-present

Unanimously elected minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries is the first Black lawmaker and the youngest member to lead a party in Congress. His political clout rising from Crown Heights to Washington, Jeffries is part of a new generation of leaders in American politics. With a foundation in social justice coupled with experience as a lawyer, the Democrat has served Brooklyn in the New York Assembly and, since 2013, as one of its U.S. congress members. As an impeachment manager, he demonstrated his flair for oratory in the proceedings against former President Donald Trump, deftly interspersing hip-hop lyrics with constitutional law.

FULL NAME: Hakeem Sekou Jeffries
BORN: August 4, 1970
BIRTHPLACE: Brooklyn, New York
SPOUSE: Kennisandra Arciniegas-Jeffries (1997-present)
CHILDREN: Joshua and Jeremiah
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Leo

Hakeem Sekou Jeffries was born on August 4, 1970, in Brooklyn, New York, to Laneda (Gomes) Jeffries, a social worker, and Marland Jeffries, a substance-abuse counselor. Hakeem and his younger brother, Hasan, were raised in Crown Heights, an important Black urban center of the 1970s and ’80s. The ideals of social justice surrounded Jeffries, both in the neighborhoods that elected Shirley Chisolm, the first Black woman to serve in Congress, and at home. His father made an unsuccessful run for the New York State Assembly on a civil rights platform.

Jeffries attended Midwood High School, a New York City public school in an area that was a haven away from his Brooklyn neighborhood, which was riddled with drugs and gangs. At Midland High School, Jeffries excelled in honors courses, was a member of the baseball team, and shared in the school yearbook his aspiration to one day become a lawyer.

Along with his family, the young Jeffries attended Cornerstone Baptist Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where sermons by Reverend Harry S. Wright (the brother of Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman) and talks by visiting politicians, introduced him to an oratorical style and delivery that he would draw from later in his career.

In 1988, Jeffries enrolled at SUNY Binghamton, a bucolic campus only a 4-hour drive from Brooklyn but culturally worlds apart. Jeffries, a political science major, acclimated quickly. He joined Kappa Alpha Psi, a historically Black fraternity, and was later elected its president. Jeffries would also meet his future wife, Kennisandra Arciniegas, on campus.

In his senior year, Jeffries was elected the political representative for the Black Student Union. That year, the organization invited Hakeem’s uncle Dr. Leonard Jeffries, a political scientist, professor, and chair of the Black Studies department at City College of New York, to speak at SUNY Binghamton. In a previous speech, he claimed that Jewish people helped finance the transatlantic slave trade, which not only put Leonard’s academic career in jeopardy, but also created controversy on the mostly white campus. Hakeem found himself in the difficult spot of balancing the university’s speaking invitation with accusations of anti-Semitism and censorship. But he showed a prowess for navigating difficult situations and an ability to calm tensions.

After completing a bachelor’s degree in 1992, Jeffries enrolled at Georgetown University, where he earned a master’s degree in public policy two years later. He then attended New York University School of Law, where he served on the Law Review and graduated magna cum laude in 1997.

Following law school, Jeffries clerked for Judge Harold Baer Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Jeffries practiced law for several years at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. He served as counsel in the litigation department of Viacom Inc. and CBS where he represented CBS in a civil lawsuit over Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction in her 2004 Super Bowl halftime show with Justin Timberlake. Jeffries also worked as counsel at Godosky & Gentile, a litigation firm in New York City.

Beginning in 2000, Jeffries ran for office twice, unsuccessfully, before winning a seat in the New York State Assembly in 2006. Supporters and the media called him “The Barack of Brooklyn;” he was young, charismatic, and born on the same day as another Black politician, future President Barack Obama. In his six years in Albany, he wrote legislation on a variety of civil rights and criminal justice reform issues, including the conversion of vacant high-end condominiums into affordable housing, ending prison-based gerrymandering, and meaningful reform of the New York Police Department’s controversial stop-and-frisk program.

Then–House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi greets incoming members of congress, including Hakeem Jeffries and Sean Patrick Maloney.

In 2012, Jeffries was elected to New York’s diverse 8th Congressional District. A member of the House Judiciary Committee and House Budget Committee, Jeffries was elected chairman of the House Democratic Caucus in November 2018. He is also the former whip of the Congressional Black Caucus and previously co-chaired the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee.

A prolific legislative author, Jeffries has seen several of his bills pass the House of Representatives, often with broad bipartisan support, such as measures to ensure access to benefits information for veterans and their families, as well as several bills that expand rights to formerly incarcerated individuals.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi named Jeffries was one of the seven impeachment managers in the January 2020 impeachment of President Donald Trump, who was accused of pressuring Ukraine to investigate his opponent Joe Biden in that year’s presidential election. In his closing argument, Jeffries called Trump “a clear and present danger to our national security,” calling for the former president’s removal from office. Trump was acquitted by the Senate two days later.

In January 2023, Hakeem Jeffries became the House minority leader.

On January 3, 2023, Jeffries was unanimously elected House minority leader of the 118^thCongress. He is the first Black American in the role and the first person born after World War II elected to lead House Democrats. Part of a new generation of leaders, Jeffries succeeds Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as House speaker and to lead a party in Congress.

Following his historic election, Jeffries said: “This is the United States of America, a land of opportunity. The fact that I’m able to stand up here today is another data point in that narrative.” It was the final portion of his inaugural speech, however, that resonated beyond the House chamber and online, where he deftly delivered a list of Democratic values in an A-to-Z format. The alphabet speech, as it became known, included the following sentence:

“House Democrats will always put American values over autocracy, benevolence over bigotry, the Constitution over the cult, democracy over demagogues, economic opportunity over extremism, freedom over fascism, governing over gaslighting, hopefulness over hatred, inclusion over isolation, justice over judicial overreach, knowledge over kangaroo courts, liberty over limitation, maturity over Mar-a-Lago, normalcy over negativity, opportunity over obstruction, people over politics, quality of life issues over QAnon, reason over racism, substance over slander, triumph over tyranny, understanding over ugliness, voting rights over voter suppression, working families over the well-connected, xenial over xenophobia, ‘yes, we can’ over ‘you can do it,’ and zealous representation over zero-sum confrontation.”

As House minority leader, Jeffries played an important role in negotiations on the 2023 bill to extend the debt ceiling and limit federal expenditures to avert a catastrophic U.S. government default in early June. The debt ceiling bill passed the House on May 31 and moved to the Senate, where it passed the next day. On June 3, President Joe Biden signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, averting a crisis.

In 1997, Jeffries married Kennisandra Arciniegas, a social worker, whom he met as an undergraduate at SUNY Binghamton. They live in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, with their two sons.

• We must hold this president (Trump)accountable for his stunning abuse of power. We must hold this president accountable for undermining America’s national security. We must impeach this president.
• House Democrats will always put American values over autocracy, benevolence over bigotry, the Constitution over the cult, democracy over demagogues, economic opportunity over extremism, freedom over fascism, governing over gaslighting, hopefulness over hatred, inclusion over isolation, justice over judicial overreach, knowledge over kangaroo courts, liberty over limitation, maturity over Mar-a-Lago, normalcy over negativity, opportunity over obstruction, people over politics, quality of life issues over QAnon, reason over racism, substance over slander, triumph over tyranny, understanding over ugliness, voting rights over voter suppression, working families over the well-connected, xenial over xenophobia, “yes, we can” over “you can do it,” and zealous representation over zero-sum confrontation.

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Kimberly Manning

Freelance Writer

Kimberly Manning is a writer and communications professional with a passion for storytelling. Life artists and underdogs inspire her. Kim published her first piece, an essay on women’s empowerment, at age 9. An avid reader and fiber enthusiast, when not thinking of her next knitting project, you’ll likely find her hiking in the outdoors.