Southern University Law Center Alumni - Cleo Fields (Paperback)

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Cleo Fields (born November 22, 1962) is a lawyer and politician. He is a former member of the United States House of Representatives from Louisiana. Fields was born in Port Allen, Louisiana. He received his undergraduate and law degrees from Southern University in Baton Rouge. Fields was elected as a Democrat to the Louisiana Senate in 1986. In 1980, he founded the fundraising group Young Adults for Positive Action. He attempted to run for Congress in 1990, but was defeated. Fields represented Louisiana's 4th congressional district in the United States Congress from 1993 through 1997. He was also an unsuccessful candidate for governor of Louisiana in 1995, losing in a landslide to Mike Foster. He did not run for reelection in 1996. His seat was taken by Republican John Cooksey who defeated the Democratic candidate Francis Thompson by a wide margin. On October 1, 2007, the Louisiana State Supreme Court ruled that Fields could not stand for re-election to his State Senate seat because of term limits. The state legislature had passed a law in 2006 that had defined the date of the swearing in of Fields and of the intended beneficiary, Shreveport Republican Wayne Waddell, in a way that would have allowed Fields to stand for re-election in November 2007 and serve one more term, but the court ruled the law unconstitutional. Fields was born in Port Allen, Louisiana, near Baton Rouge, the seventh of ten children. His dock-worker father died when he was four, leaving his mother, Alice, to tend for the children herself. Their extreme poverty led to an eviction, after which they moved to South Baton Rouge. Alice took in laundry and worked as a maid to make ends meet. Fields reminisced in the Internet magazine Salon on having holes in the bottoms of his ... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=3390635