Dead and gone but the legacies of these black congressmen are indelible

Elijah Cummings 

Cummings died on Thursday, October 17, due to “complications concerning longstanding health challenges”

A son of a sharecropper, Cummings began his political career in Maryland, rising through the ranks of the Maryland House of Delegates. He won his congressional seat in a special election in 1996, replacing former Rep. Kweisi Mfume to represent Maryland’s 7th Congressional District.

“After coming from the state where you had a lot of people working together, it’s clear that the lines are drawn here,” Cummings said about a month after entering office in Washington in 1996.

Cummings continued to blossom in Congress, becoming the senior Democrat on Benghazi Committee, deploying his fiery voice throughout his career to fight injustices, struggles and the needs of the inner-city dwellers.

“Discrimination is a blight– cancer that kills. It may not end a physical existence but it can destroy the meaningful lives of its victims. If you deprive a human being of a single breath, the damage is not great. 

“Stop a person from breathing for two minutes, and there will still be life, though it may be painful. If the time climbs to ten minutes, the victim dies. Although discrimination is not ordinarily a physical attack, it is no less destructive to a joyous and meaningful life than cancer or a chokehold,” Cummings said in one of his speeches on October 15, 1985.

As chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, he instigated several investigations into the Trump administration, including probes in 2019 relating to Trump’s family members serving while in the White House.