Maryland Rep. and House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings took to the microphone Wednesday morning to deliver an epically powerful and very personal speech during hearings on H.R. 1, the massive voter rights reform package better known as the For the People Act of 2019. Heavily promised by Democrats during the midterm elections and first unveiled on Jan. 4, H.R. 1, in the simplest of terms, is some heavy, heavy-hitting legislation. The bill is nothing less than ambitious, seeking to better protect voter rights, fix the worst of American campaign finance laws, and correct undeniable flaws in the election system, as well as make it much easier to cast one’s ballot—and ensure each ballot is counted.
In their endless war on all things decent, Republicans have already vowed the For the People Act hasn’t a chance of even getting a vote in the Senate, much less getting Donald Trump’s signature. So vehement is the GOP in its opposition to the bill that Kentucky’s very own Majority Leader Mitch McConnell even wrote an angry misinformation-filled rant op-ed about it, presumably with a quill dipped in the blood of suffragists from days gone by.
McConnell echoed his written rant on the Senate floor, warbling at his fellow senators that H.R. 1 was an “attempt to rewrite the rules … in order to benefit one [party] over the other,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that the current rules benefit his party.
Oh, and then there’s this “outrage.”
But this story is not about McConnell. This is about Elijah Cummings. It’s Black History Month, so this is a particularly great time to get to know him.
This is Elijah Cummings being sworn in back in January.
One of seven children born to South Carolina sharecroppers with only a third-grade education, Cummings, 68, grew up poor in South Baltimore during Jim Crow. At age 11, he was one of the first children to integrate a Baltimore city pool in 1962.
“People were throwing bottles, rocks, and screaming,” he says, shaking his head, “calling us everything but a child of God.”
In 2014, Cummings told Baltimore Magazine that the swimming pool integration—coordinated by members of the local NAACP, including Maryland’s first black woman lawyer, Juanita Jackson Mitchell—is what led him to become an attorney.
Cummings says he’ll never forget meeting Mitchell for the first time. “She said, ‘Children, there is a real pool,’ by which she meant an Olympic-size pool, ‘and it’s nice and deep, and you can swim to your heart’s delight.’ Those were her words: ‘To your heart’s delight.’
“The thing she didn’t tell us was that it was segregated,” adds Cummings with a belly laugh.
Cummings was placed in special education as a child, and has long been vocal about how that label shaped him as he went on to graduate with high marks from Baltimore High School, then from the prestigious Howard University, before earning his J.D. at the University of Maryland. After passing the bar on his first try, Cummings eased into a successful private practice, and had no plans to run for office. Everyone needs a mentor, and Cummings was no different: He was quietly giving back to his community when he got noticed by the political machine.
The way Cummings tells it, he had to be coaxed into running for office. … he hadn’t considered politics until former Baltimore delegate Lena Lee reached out to him after she’d heard about the free tutoring course he’d set up with the help of other attorneys—black and white, he notes—to help African-American law school graduates crack the state bar exam. … “She’d been searching for a female African-American attorney to replace her, but after learning about the free course I’d organized, she said I was the kind of person she was looking for,” Cummings says. “She told me, ‘You’ll do.’ I owe her everything. Here I was, somebody she hadn’t known, and she started fundraising for me, getting a campaign going.”
And so Elijah Cummings’ next chapter began. After serving in the Maryland House of Delegates for 14 years, Cummings was elected to Congress in 1996. His beloved father, who died in 2000, was moved to tears on the day he was sworn in. In a January 2019 interview with 60 Minutes, Cummings reflected on that magical day.
[A]s then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich swore him in, he looked over to see his father crying.
When he asked his father about his emotion, his father pointed out that the Capitol Building where Cummings would join Congress was the same building where African-Americans had been referred to as three-fifths of a man, the same place where past politicians debated slavery.
Cummings recalled what his father told him next: "He said, 'When I think about you being sworn in today,' he said, 'now I see what I could've been if I had had an opportunity.'"
Cummings is never one to let history be forgotten: providing opportunities for all remains a crucial part of the congressman’s ethos. In that vein, he has remained very vocal about the impact of mentors and their lessons on his life.
Cummings says he’s remained grateful for the mentoring he received at Howard, as well as the support of others … “I have a responsibility to fulfill to those people, and that is to do my part for the next generation,” says Cummings.
True to his roots, and to his constituents, Cummings has lived in the same Baltimore row house for over three decades. His “give-back” nature is no secret in what he calls the “inner-inner city,” and he’s known for his generosity.
“Wherever we are,” says his wife Maya Rockeymoore, “people come up to him, usually sharing their problem and looking for some kind of assistance, and he always listens and tries to put them in touch with someone who can help. Sunday after church, there’s usually a line that forms.”
As a member of Congress, the beloved Rep. Cummings has made waves by doing constituency swaps that have seen him visit conservative, oh-so-white Utah, and dropped Republican Jason Chaffetz in West Baltimore, where Chaffetz says he first learned of “food deserts.”
Cummings’ impassioned yet classy rebuke of Rep. Darrell Issa during a session of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee made him a social media hero in 2014, a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by Donald Trump, who name-dropped Cummings in a fat lie early in his presidency.
“Elijah Cummings was in my office,” Donald Trump told the New York Times in April 2017. “And he said, ‘You will go down as one of the great presidents in the history of our country.’ ”
It’s a prophecy that Cummings said he never actually offered … As Cummings recalls, he offered the president advice: If you stop trying to divide the country and work on issues that can unite them, then you could go down in history as a great president. He honestly believed it.
Today, as chair of the House Oversight Committee, Cummings’ hopes for Trump are long gone, and he’s focused on preserving voting rights for not just black people, but all Americans. It’s not a new problem or pet cause for Cummings, of course—his Baltimore Magazine profile from 2014 notes that any mention of trampling voting rights causes a “visceral” response in the congressman.
Honestly, that should be any American’s response to blatant civil rights violations, but Republicans gonna Republican. Thus, during Wednesday’s H.R. 1 hearings, Cummings exploded on social media again after he cited the racism that fueled North Carolina’s recent voter suppression attempts, noting the declaration in the federal decision on the 4th District that the provisions “target African Americans with almost surgical precision,” offering “cures for problems that did not exist.”
Infuriated, Cummings offered an intimate window into why he considers protecting voter rights to be an essential battle he refuses to lose.
The reason why this quote means so much to me is that one year ago today, on my mother’s dying bed, at 92 years old, a former sharecropper, her last words were “Do not let them take our votes away from us!” They had fought, she had fought, and seen people harmed, beaten, trying to vote. Talk about inalienable rights. Voting is crucial. And I don’t give a damn how you look at it: There are efforts to stop people from voting. That’s not right!
This is not Russia. This is the United States of America, and I will fight until the death to make sure every citizen—whether they’re Green Party, whether they’re Freedom Party, whether they’re Democrat, Republican, whoever—has that right to vote. Because it is the essence of our democracy.
Seemingly aware of his own role in black history, in American history, he entreated his fellow members of Congress to do the right thing as they surged toward making history themselves.
And we can play around, and act like … guess what? I want to be clear, that when they look back on this moment 200 years from now, that there are those of us who stood up. And they’ll be able to say, “They stood up and they defended the right to vote.”
You know what the problem is? For so many people, their rights are pulled away from them, then they gotta put in laws to give ‘em back. What does that mean? They cannot progress rapidly, they cannot progress with the rest of society. And all they’re trying to do is trying to control their own destiny.
Powerful stuff.
Predictably, members of the GOP found a way to misconstrue Cummings’ impassioned plea as an attack on the GOP.
Later on in the hearing, Rep. Jody Hice (R-Ga.) took issue with Cummings’ comments and accused the Democratic chairman of suggesting Republicans were the only ones that commit voter fraud.
True to form, Cummings shut that nonsense down quickly.
“I didn’t say that. I quoted the court and I did not just blame Republicans or anybody. I was trying to make it clear that it has been made far [more] difficult for people who look like me to be able to vote. Period,” he said. “We all need to be addressing that.”
This Black History Month, and every day, Cummings—son of sharecroppers, and child warrior against segregation turned congressman—reminds us that it’s so important to think about which side of history we wish to be on—as citizens, as a party, and as a nation.