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Cynthia McKinney's was not quite a household name in America before the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. To those who follow the goings-on on Capitol Hill, McKinney at the time was a feisty Georgia Democratic congresswoman who gave voice to issues no one else would touch, from voting rights, reparations and U.S. intelligence on Sept. 11, to Zimbabwe's defiance of U.S. will and increasing U.S. militarism abroad. To many of her constituents in the ethnically diverse Dekalb County -- which includes one of Georgia's largest populations of affluent blacks and many wealthy whites -- she was the elected official who really delivered. To others, she was too much the "homegirl," with a tendency to engage in what one former aide describes as "a down-home, us-against-them type of rhetoric" -- all of which, it is said, alienated her from an enormous segment of Dekalb's increasingly sophisticated community.
She has a special relationship with the hip hop community. They see her as a friend and she sees them as a powerful force for social change. She was one of a few members of Congress who participated in Russell Simmons' first Hip-Hop Summit in New York City, and has endorsed the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network's 15-point national agenda that calls for equal justice for all without discrimination based on race, color, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, age, creed or class; the elimination of poverty; and the highest quality public education possible.
The name Cynthia McKinney became famous after 9/11. Today, the world has come to know her as the congresswoman who dared to ask, in reference to Sept. 11, "What did the Bush administration know and when did they know it?" It was a question for which she was pilloried, as news organizations bent her words into unrecognizable shapes in the swell of post-9/11 patriotism. The ultimate fallout came when McKinney was ousted from her congressional seat in an unprecedented storming of the Democratic primary in November 2002 by 48,000 historically Republican voters.
In the wider African-American community, many have begun to ask: Who is this woman? In an interview with The Network Journal, conducted by e-mail, McKinney responds: "I am a child of the civil rights era.... I call myself a...