Advocate stars in many Baltimoreans’ stories

Howie Ghee recalled U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings out on the streets calming tensions on North Avenue during the 2015 unrest.

Gilbert Ricks saw him in person several times: When he visited Ricks’ mother’s church in Northwest Baltimore, when he delivered encouraging remarks to inmates in jail, even when the two both happened to be jogging at the same time in Druid Hill Park when they were younger.

Lawrence Henderson worked on a crew that helped renovate the basement of Cummings’ home on Madison Avenue in West Baltimore.

Many Baltimore residents have their own stories about Cummings, a civil rights advocate and towering presence in Maryland and national politics whose devotion to his city and its people endured until his death Thursday at age 68. His constituents mourned his death after awaking to the news — some calling into radio stations in tears, while others reflected on the loss his death represents to the city, state and country.

Cummings was a “father figure” and a “civil rights icon” who “left a mark” with his efforts to end segregation, said Matthew Hubbard, a West

were often aspirational, uttered while mired in mud, yet pointing us toward a mountaintop.

He knew what he wanted, and he knew what he did not want.

He did not want the children of migrants separated from their parents at the border. “We are better than this,” he said.

He wanted the president to be civil, courageous, kind and honest. He wanted the president to abide by the Constitution.

“We are better than this. We really are,” Cummings said in February, after Michael Cohen described his sordid undertakings as the president’s one-time lawyer. “As a country, we are so much better than this.”

When Donald Trump first took office, Cummings was the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. He expressed grave concerns that the new president could be in conflict with the emoluments clause of the Constitution. The clause bars any official from accepting salary, gifts or profit from a foreign power. Cummings believed Trump had to turn all assets into a blind trust to avoid conflicts of interest and accusations of corruption.

“We have to guard the democracy,” Cummings said. “If we had a Democrat as president, who owned 111 companies in 18 countries, I’d go to that president and say, ‘Look, you gotta deal with this.’ ”

Cummings wanted Republicans to help him convince Trump to recognize the law, to divest, to rise to the ethical demands of the presidency — to, essentially, be “better than this.”

“I want to be very careful about this and approach it in a bipartisan way,” he told me. “I want to include Republicans and Democrats.”

But, of course, that did not happen. The super-partisanship of Congress long frustrated him, especially when he believed Republicans on the oversight committee were abusing their investigative powers to embarrass and harass Obama administration officials.

In 2014, during a hearing on the practices of the Internal Revenue Service, Cummings challenged an abrupt adjournment by Darrell Issa, the committee’s Republican chairman. Issa rudely cut off Cummings’ microphone. I was listening in my car when it happened, and Cummings’ booming voice echoed in the hearing room. He continued to address the hearing, and he was incredulous that Issa would shut off his microphone.

“We are better than this!” Cummings shouted.

Back home in Baltimore, he was just as aspirational. Baltimore could be so much better than it is, he said, if we could just get the schools up to speed, just get more kids into summer jobs, find employment for ex-offenders coming home from prison. He sponsored job fairs every year. He used to call me to suggest subjects for the column, and they were always about people or programs that were already quietly trying to make Baltimore a better city.

As you might imagine, his tone was profoundly sad when we spoke of the violence in the city and the loss of young lives, in particular. “I’ve often said that our children are the living messages we send to a future we will never see,” he said. “But now our children are sending us to a future they will never see. There’s something wrong with that picture.”

He repeated those words at Freddie Gray’s funeral in April of 2015, a tense and depressing time in Baltimore. On the day of the west-side rioting, and the days following, Cummings was on the streets, talking to hundreds of people, reminding them that we are better than this.

In recent years, of course, there were health issues, but while he might have lost a step, Cummings never lost his passion. As bad as things have been in Baltimore since the spring of 2015, with the persistent violence, he never lost his belief in something better.

And people who saw him on the big stage in Washington or on the sidewalks of West Baltimore understood that about him. They understood him to be a righteous man and a fighter, someone who chose politics and public service because he believed in the possible, believed we could be so much better than we are.