The quiet halls of the Capitol can make a man feel lonely, depending on the time of day. The mornings can creep into afternoons as the news turns a weekday into a hustle. I was barely a man when I first walked those halls, when I heard the tap from the shoes belonging to the people of power who shape our democracy. The faces among them were mighty. Speaker Nancy Pelosi shivering in the Federal Triangle in February in fancy, candy-colored coats. Representative Cedric Richmond gliding across the tiles of the Cannon Building in shiny penny loafers. Representative Maxine Waters staring down enemies in committee chambers. In many ways, it was the house of power as illustrated by our shows and canonical texts. But one could take in the true power of Congress only if they met Elijah Cummings, a lawmaker unwilling to shrink from his role as an arbiter for the truth.
I first met Representative Cummings in Washington during the spring of 2016. I had just moved to the nation’s capital, knowing nothing of the world except what I’d read in books. Cummings was delivering one of his emphatic, pulpit-inspired monologues about the un-American atrocities of the Flint water crisis. I ran him down in the hallway later that day for clarification on some minutiae that would be the news of the day. He answered me gleefully and walked off, only to stroll back to return a question.
“Do you know who I am?” he said.
“I do,” I remember responding.
“Good,” he replied. “Just wanted to make sure you didn’t think I was John Lewis!” he laughed and then hurried back down the hallway.
This became a classic story for young, black reporters covering Congress during that time. Cummings introduced himself that way to many of us. He understood the unspoken thing between black members and black writers, that despite our roles, we see each other. That day, Cummings made sure I saw him, and before me stood a giant of American progress, a deity to Baltimore, and an unflinching politician who fought for equality every day until his dying breath.
Sadly, that came Thursday as Cummings died at age 68 in the same place he was born and fought for, his beloved Baltimore. He was a true public servant and a beacon for civil rights. His life was defined by the love of his community and a fierce, unyielding commitment to ensuring that truth wins over power. Any Hill staffer I spoke with on Thursday either fought through tears or kept repeating how “devastating” his death was. As the Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland, said in a statement the morning Washington awoke to Cummings’s death, “quite possibly no elected official mattered so much to his constituents.” Cummings was a black man who gave a booming voice to Baltimore’s black population. “He worked until his last breath because he believed our democracy was the highest and best expression of our collective humanity and that our nation’s diversity was our promise, not our problem,” his wife, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, said.
Cummings was born in Baltimore in 1951, the son of sharecroppers from South Carolina, when America was raging over state-sanctioned racial segregation. He was the progeny of America’s original sin, a child of parents who became beloved as preachers and moved north during the Great Migration to improve the prospects of their kids. At age 11, he was among the first to integrate a city pool, as whites holding signs reading “White People Have Rights Too” pelted him with rocks and bottles, which left a scar on his face for the remainder of his days. He was a man of Howard University, a law student of Maryland, and the first black person in the state’s House of Delegates to be named “speaker pro tem.”
He was sworn into Congress in 1996, with his father crying at the top of the chamber. He was the same on his first day as he would be on his last: staunch shoulders and furrowed brow, a singing cadence but a stern bottom lip. Cheers rang throughout the hall with members yelling, “Speech! Speech! Speech!” as Cummings hugged black members tightly. The applause, carried by C-SPAN, grew raucous. The cheers ebullient. The claps didn’t cease for nearly 90 seconds. It was a beautiful sight. How frequently, in the rooms that slaves built, do we see the black body cherished in such a way?
“My father … he was so proud,” Cummings would later tell CBS News. “And I see my father. My father was just wiping away the tears. Just wiping away. And I’d never seen my father cry. Never. He came down and I said, ‘Dad, I noticed you’re crying.’ And I wanted, I almost wanted him to lie to me. I wanted him to say he was sweating. He said, ‘Yeah, I’m crying.’ I said, ‘Why you crying? You crying because your son became a member of Congress?’ ... He said, ‘This is great, don’t get me wrong. But I kept looking at your hand. And I realized the same blood that runs in your hand, runs in mine. … Isn’t this the place where they used to call us slaves?’ I said, ‘Yes sir.’ He said, ‘Isn’t this the place they called us three-fifths of a man?’ I said, ‘Yes sir.’ He said, ‘Isn’t this the place they used to call us chattel?’ I said, ‘Yes sir.’ He said, ‘You know,’ and he said these words, and I’ll never forget. He said, ‘When I think about you being sworn in today, now I see what I could’ve been if I had an opportunity.’”
His first speech from the House floor stirred the room just the same. Cummings said his mission was to empower people, to make them realize power resided in them, a vision that was created “long, long ago.” He recited his favorite Parren Mitchell poem, the same one he recited almost “20 times a day” while in Congress. He leaned forward and the melody left his mouth, smooth as Ray Charles in the summertime, heavy like the anvil of a Toni Morrison novel. “I only have a minute. Sixty seconds in it. Forced upon me I did not choose it. But I know that I must use it. Give account if I abuse it. Suffer if I lose it. Only a tiny little minute. But eternity is in it,” he said.
For the next 23 years, the seat of power wouldn’t have been shaped the same without Cummings in it. How we view our wars, our peace, our power, and our patience as a nation was in part molded with his hands, with that voice, with those brows, with all of that attitude hanging from his Baltimore twang. He stood tall on voting rights, noting he’d “fight until the death” for any citizen’s right to vote because it “is the essence of our democracy.” At the Democratic National Convention in 2016, he proudly proclaimed that “Black Lives Matter” to chants from the crowd, a callback to the aftermath of the horrendous killing of Freddie Gray in his hometown of Baltimore, to when he stood on the front lines with a megaphone and begged for peace. He was one of the most powerful political figures of our lifetimes, a leader on the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump but a man whose life and legacy were so large that to minimize them to only that is a disservice to the power he wielded.
When he was angry at those who abused his fellow Americans, the blood would rush to his temple and the veins would stretch across his brim. In interrogations across the capital, he’d form a knuckle in the palm of his right hand and jab across tables and lecterns. His intent was to be heard, because the powerless were suffering, and if he and his colleagues wouldn’t protect them, they’d be swallowed whole by this nation.
He often spoke of angels. As the chairman of the powerful House Oversight Committee, he would weave the mythic beings into his prose. When speaking at Michael Cohen’s hearing in February, he proclaimed proudly that we were better than this moment we found ourselves in, as our politics take a different form from the executive branch, as racism and white supremacy run as rampant as they ever have. It was a feature of his last year in politics. Cummings genuinely believed in the American experiment, in the egalitarian ideal of the melting pot.
“The one meeting I had with President Trump, I said to him, ‘The greatest gift that you and I, Mr. President, that we can give to our children is making sure that we give them a democracy that is intact. A democracy better than the one that we came up on.’ … When we’re dancing with the angels, the question we’ll be asked: In 2019, what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact?” he boomed. “Did we stand on the sidelines and say nothing?”
In June, he said the same in terms of the impeachment inquiry into the president: “I may be dancing with the angels when all of this will be corrected, but I gotta tell you, we must fight for our democracy.” The same month, when questioning a Homeland Security chief about the horrid treatment of children in concentration camps at the Southern border, he spoke again of the same divine layer: “It’s not the deed that you do to a child. It’s the memory. It’s the memory! We are the United States of America. We are the greatest country in the world! We are the ones that can go anywhere in the world and save people. Come on. We’re better than that! When we are dancing with the angels these children will be dealing with the issues that have been presented to them.”
Cummings was a voice of unsurpassed moral clarity, a champion of the prevailing idea that equality was promised to every person, and a defender of that truth. He embodied traits that should be enviable to all our public servants. He was a conscience in Congress. A man who led with compassion and argued for the betterment of American life with the fire of a prosecutor and the ordained dogma of a preacher.
The poet Maya Angelou once wrote that, “When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder, lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants lumber after safety.” That is to say, when giants of this ilk tumble, we all hear it. His life was too monumental. His fight too steadfast. Our political process will look different without Elijah Cummings. The man kind enough to chat with a boy on a spring day and regale in a simple joke to make him remember his face. The man with fire in his bones to ask America about itself with a grace from the political dais we may never see again.