The civil rights pioneer who infuriated President Trump

For over two decades, Rep. Elijah Cummings was a powerful presence on Capitol Hill. Equipped with a resonant baritone and a poetic turn of phrase, the Democrat was sent to the House 13 times by the voters of Maryland’s 7th Congressional District, which includes much of Baltimore. He campaigned tirelessly on issues that affected the poor in his majority-black district, advocating for lower prescription drug prices, criminal justice reform, and help for drug addicts. But it was as chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, a role he assumed earlier this year, that Cummings shot to national prominence. He launched numerous investigations into the Trump administration, issuing subpoenas for President Trump’s tax returns and summoning the president’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to testify about hush-money payments to women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump. In turn, the president tossed insults at Cummings, calling him “a brutal bully” and describing his hometown as a “rat and rodent infested mess.” Cummings responded by inviting the president to his district and calling on all politicians to stop “using racist language and encouraging reprehensible behavior. It only creates more division among us.”

Born to a family of Southern sharecroppers who headed north in search of a better life, “Cummings grew up in the racially fractured Baltimore of the 1950s and ’60s,” said The Washington Post. At age 11, he helped integrate a local swimming pool, where white people threw bottles and rocks at him in disgust. Cummings graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Howard University and then—inspired by Perry Mason, the fictional TV defense lawyer—studied law at the University of Maryland. While working as an attorney, Cummings served 14 years in the Maryland House of Delegates, said The Wall Street Journal.

He rose “to become the first African-American in Maryland history to be named speaker pro tempore.” Cummings won his seat in Congress in

1996, and as a member of the Oversight Committee became “a powerful voice opposing corruption.”

“When the Maryland Democrat got revved up,” his booming baritone would echo through the House, said FoxNews.com. In 2014, then–Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) cut Cummings’ microphone as he tried to ask a question during a hearing on whether the IRS had politicized the tax status of conservative organizations. “Mr. Chairman, you cannot run a committee like this,” Cummings thundered. “We’re better than that as a country, we’re better than that as a committee.” Afterward, a fellow Democratic representative gave Cummings a megaphone bearing a plaque that read “The Gentleman Will Not Yield.” When Baltimore erupted into looting and violence the next year following the death in police custody of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man, Cummings strode the streets night after night with that bullhorn in hand. “It’s time to go home!” he told the crowds. “Go home!”

Cummings could also be a peacemaker within Congress, said Politico.com. He was “a rare figure who forged bonds across the aisle,” including a deep friendship with Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who is one of Trump’s fiercest supporters. “We need to get away from party,” Cummings said earlier this year of hyperpartisanship in politics, “and deal with each other as human beings.”