MD-07: Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat who chaired the powerful House Oversight and Reform Committee, died Thursday morning at the age of 68 from what his office called “complications concerning long-standing health challenges.”
A special election will be held sometime in the future to succeed Cummings in the 7th Congressional District, a safely blue seat that included much of Baltimore and its western suburbs. The party nominees will be chosen through partisan primaries.
Cummings was born in Baltimore to former sharecroppers who had left South Carolina. The congressman would spend his career talking about how his mother had watched as African Americans were beaten when trying to gain the right to vote, and he would recount, “Her last words were ‘Do not let them take our votes away from us.’”
In 1962 at the age of 11, Cummings and his friends worked to integrate a local pool that had barred black swimmers. Cummings would recount decades later that angry white adults “called us every name you can imagine, everything but a child of God” and told them to go back to where they came from. Mobs also threw rocks and bottles at Cummings and the other youths while they were in the pool, and one projectile left him with a scar on his face he’d have for the rest of his life.
Cummings became an attorney and in 1982, he won a seat in the state House of Delegates with the support of a number of Baltimore elected officials. Cummings went on to become the state’s first black speaker pro tem.
Cummings ran for Congress in a crowded 1996 special election to succeed Kweisi Mfume, who resigned to lead the NAACP. Cummings’ main opponent in the primary was the Rev. Frank Reid III, the influential head of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and the stepbrother of Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke. Polls initially showed a tight race between Cummings, Reid, and three other candidates, and it appeared likely for much of the campaign that the winner would prevail with just a small plurality of the vote.
However, Cummings established himself as the frontrunner late in the race. Cummings had a big financial advantage over the rest of the field, which allowed him to run TV ads well before anyone else; Reid only went on the air during the final weekend of the race. Cummings, who also earned endorsements from several prominent newspapers papers, ended up beating Reid 37-24. On election night Cummings declared, “And so it is tonight on this fifth day of March 1996, the son of sharecroppers rises up to be the Democratic nominee for the Congress of the United States.”
Cummings had no trouble winning the general election for his safely Democratic district, and he never faced any serious opposition during his long congressional career. Cummings did spend a year considering a Senate bid to succeed retiring incumbent Barbara Mikulski in 2016, but he announced that he’d stay in the House the day before the filing deadline.
Cummings attracted national attention as the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee during the Obama administration by standing up to Republican Chairman Darrell Issa and his many bogus investigations. In one memorable 2014 incident, Issa cut Cummings’ microphone after the Democrat questioned Issa’s handling of an investigation into allegations that the IRS was biased against conservative groups; Issa soon apologized.
Cummings also received very positive reviews from progressives across the country the following year for defending Hillary Clinton during her 11-hour testimony in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, a hearing he decried as an “abusive effort” to “derail Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign.”
Cummings was also active at home on Baltimore. In April of 2015, after a black man named Freddie Gray died in police custody, Cummings spoke at his funeral and declared, “[W]e will not rest until we address this and see that justice is done.” Later that spring during the unrest that followed Gray’s death, Cummings famously took to the streets for several nights with a bullhorn and appealed for calm. (That bullhorn, which was emblazoned with a gold label reading, “The gentleman will not yield,” was a gift from Issa following their confrontation the previous year.)
A few months before his death, Cummings and his Baltimore constituents were the target of several racist tweets from Donald Trump. Cummings did not respond directly, but he used his speech at the National Press Club to condemn “racist language” coming from the country’s leaders and called for them to “work together for the common good.” Cummings also said, “God has called me to this moment. I did not ask for it.”