Who was Elijah Cummings? Was he the resolute partisan who, as a senior House Democrat, emerged as a key figure in the impeachment investigation of President Trump, signing subpoenas on his deathbed? Or was he the “formidable political opponent” described by his longtime congressional sparring partner, former Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, who also regarded Cummings as “my friend,” saying, “I had genuine affection for Elijah, and I admired the path he took, over the course of his life.”
The Democratic congressman was only human; he was both of these things. Cummings was a product of the old Baltimore Democratic machine, the same one that had elected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s father as mayor when Cummings was growing up. He was also devoutly religious and a regular communicant at the New Psalmist Baptist Church in his Baltimore neighborhood, where the funeral was held last Friday. Cummings was a “fighter” who could “punch hard,” in Gowdy’s words. He was also a courtly and compassionate colleague who sought friendships across the aisle and went “out of his way to encourage a member of [Gowdy’s] staff because he knew what it was like to be a young professional of color.”
Cummings, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, died on Oct. 17 at age 68. Two years earlier, he had undergone surgery to repair his aortic valve and had suffered complications from the operation and a knee infection in the two years since. He had been getting around the Capitol in a wheelchair, but it had come as a shock and surprise to colleagues to learn that he had lately been in hospice care when he died.
To some degree, Cummings was also a product of Maryland, the state his sharecropper father and mother had moved to from South Carolina after World War II. The Maryland in which Cummings was born in 1951 was appreciably different from the state he represented in Congress. Now dominated politically by Greater Baltimore and the deep-blue Washington, D.C., suburbs, the Maryland of the 1950s was still very much a border state with a slight Southern inflection and sizable rural population. In 1861, a secessionist murder plot had forced President-elect Abraham Lincoln to disguise himself while his train passed through Baltimore on its way to Washington.
Cummings was too young to have been a figure in the civil rights movement — he was 17 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated — but he was old enough to have been directly affected by the vestiges of segregation still extant in his home state.
In the summer of 1962, when he was 11 years old, a local NAACP attorney named Juanita Jackson Mitchell encouraged Cummings and other boys in his neighborhood to abandon their small, shallow local pool for a nearby Olympic-sized one that was ostensibly open to the public but had not yet been integrated. According to press coverage of the time, the swimmers were greeted by a crowd of angry white residents waving signs, hollering insults, and surrounding the pool while held back by a phalanx of police.
Rocks and bottles were thrown, one of which hit Cummings, slashing his eyebrow and scarring his face. According to an Associated Press report, “the injured child … was driven from the scene in a police cruiser.” Such an experience might have scarred Cummings’s temperament as well as his forehead. But even at 11, his reaction was characteristic. When told afterward that “Miss Mitchell,” who had also been hit and injured by flying objects, was a lawyer, “I declared in that moment that I was going to become a lawyer.”
The third child of seven, studious and ambitious, Cummings’s promise was recognized early and encouraged. He attended Baltimore City College, the historic magnet school for gifted students, and a local druggist paid for his application to Howard University, where he majored in political science and rose through the ranks of student government to become its president. After earning his law degree at the University of Maryland, Cummings practiced law in Baltimore and, at age 31, was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates.
In Annapolis, Cummings’s natural political gifts and cordial manner were amply rewarded. Liked and admired by legislators in both parties, he was a favorite of the dominant Democratic leadership, chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus, and the first African American to serve as speaker pro tempore, the No. 2 post in the House. In 1996, when Democratic Rep. Kweisi Mfume resigned from Congress to become president of the NAACP, Cummings led a crowded field of aspirants in the Democratic primary to succeed him.
The 7th Congressional District, which Cummings represented for the next 23 years, was described in a malicious caricature this past year by Trump as a “rat and rodent-infested mess [where] no human being would want to live.” Imaginatively gerrymandered in the early 1970s by the Democratic-controlled General Assembly, it looks on the map like a giant jaw set to devour the upper Chesapeake Bay, encompassing Cummings’s home base in urban West Baltimore, the suburban black precincts in neighboring Baltimore County, and pockets of white voters in small-town Howard County. It was explicitly designed to be a safe black seat and for the past half-century, all three occupants — Cummings, Mfume, and Parren Mitchell — have been African American. (Cummings’s widow, chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party, is expected to run for his seat.)
The 7th District is also representative of the city of Baltimore’s gradual transition from a mercantile and manufacturing center to, in places, a post-industrial wasteland, especially in the devastated landscape of West Baltimore. This was a continual frustration to Cummings, who sought to direct federal money and programs to the old factory precincts where his parents had thrived and the neighborhoods where such famous inhabitants as H.L. Mencken had once lived. There was a poignant scene in the spring of 2015, after the death of local resident Freddy Gray in a police van, when severe rioting broke out. Congressman Cummings could be seen walking the streets, day after night, bullhorn in hand, seeking to quell the unrest and save his old neighborhoods from further destruction.
Something of the same impulse informed him in Congress. Cummings was a party loyalist, a liberal Democrat, and a good soldier in the ranks of his caucus. When, in 2010, the ranking minority member on the Oversight Committee stepped down from office, Cummings’s patron Pelosi promoted him over the head of the next Democrat in line, Rep. Edolphus Towns of New York, because she feared that Towns was insufficiently combative. The Republicans had retaken control of the House and were expected, in time-honored congressional fashion, to harry the Obama administration with investigations and televised hearings.
All went according to plan. The House Oversight Committee held hearings on a variety of Obama-era scandals, including Operation Fast and Furious, in which the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had allowed weapons to fall into the hands of Mexican drug traffickers, resulting in the shooting death of an American border patrol agent, and the 2012 killing of four American officials, including Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens, in an attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi.
The hearings were suitably rancorous, especially the Benghazi inquiry, which featured petulant testimony from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and viewers grew accustomed to testy exchanges between Cummings and a succession of GOP chairmen, including Darryl Issa of California, Jason Chaffetz of Utah, and Gowdy. And the spectacle persisted into the Trump administration, especially after last year when Democrats regained control of the House. Now Cummings was committee chairman and the topics were Russian collusion and, of course, impeachment.
Yet what viewers did not see, and the press and social media largely ignored, were Cummings’s conciliatory skills and cross-party instincts. He was a reliable ally of Republican lawmakers on legislation of common interest. He traveled to Utah to “bond” with Chaffetz and visit his home turf. He called the founding chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, Rep. Mark Meadows, “one of my best friends” and publicly defended him against a charge of racism by Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib. At a time when his party had already embarked on daily assaults against the newly elected president, he met with Trump at the White House to talk about prescription drug costs, and the two fell into a lengthy discussion of race.
In due course that unlikely relationship soured, and blame can probably be assigned to both sides. The toxic atmosphere of Capitol Hill — of 2019 politics — probably contributed to Cummings’s decline. And yet there remains the ideal of a civic warrior who was also unfailingly civil. “We see people on television a couple of times,” said Gowdy, “and we think we know them and what they are about.”
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
