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‘STILL NOT FREE’
ELIJAH CUMMINGS, 62 years old,
has lived and seen the best — and
the worst — of what this country
means, offers and does to a black
man. He knows the promise and
pain of Black America.
His parents were Southern
sharecroppers who moved to Baltimore for a better life. The budding civil rights movement was
active in the city, and schools and
public facilities became integrated
when he was a boy. They were excellent, and he went on to become
HUFFINGTON
07.28.13
“She called him ‘son’!”
I said, ‘Mom, he’s
the president.’”
student body president at Howard
University, earned a law degree
and now serves as a Democrat in
the House, representing the city in
which he grew up.
He recently took his 86-yearold mother, Ruth Cummings,
to meet his close friend, Barack
Obama. A Pentecostal preacher,
she told the president, “I want
U.S. Rep.
Elijah
Cummings
(D-Md.) on
Capitol Hill in
Washington,
D.C., in June
2013.