Charles B. Rangel, the former dean of New York’s congressional delegation, who became the first Black chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, only to relinquish that position when he was censured for an ethics violation, died on Monday. He was 94.
His death was announced by his family. The announcement did not say where he died.
A mainstay of Harlem’s Democratic old guard, Mr. Rangel was first elected to Congress in 1970, toppling the raffish civil rights pioneer Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a 13-term incumbent. He went on to serve in the House longer than any other New Yorker but one: Emanuel Celler, who represented Brooklyn for nearly 50 years until his defeat in 1972.
Mr. Rangel retired in 2016 after winning a 23rd term despite the ethics allegation — making him the ninth-longest continuously serving member of the House in American history.
In 2000, he was instrumental in persuading Hillary Clinton to enter electoral politics by running for the Senate from New York when Daniel Patrick Moynihan retired.
Mr. Powell’s absences from Washington and his refusal to pay a slander judgment had prompted the House in 1967 to strip him of a committee chairmanship and exclude him from Congress. A decade later, Mr. Rangel also got caught up in an ethics investigation.
Mr. Rangel had successfully lobbied to become the first Black member of the Ways and Means Committee in 1974, and to win the chairmanship in 2006 when Democrats regained control of the House. But he was forced to give up the gavel early in 2010 after the House Committee on Ethics admonished him for violating congressional gift rules by accepting corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean.
