‘STILL NOT FREE’
you to know, son, I pray for you
every day.”
“She called him ‘son’!” Cummings recalled with a laugh. “I
said, ‘Mom, he’s the president.’
She told me it was the best day of
her life. It blew her mind to meet
a black president.”
But as Cummings rose — indeed, as Barack Obama rose in
Chicago — Baltimore fell.
Cummings’ district, which is
60 percent African-American, encompasses block upon block of
abandoned, boarded-up housing.
The congressman lives on one such
block. Schools and other public
institutions are under crushing financial pressure. Poverty, joblessness and incarceration: all rampant, and in many cases worsened
in recent years of recession.
“The unemployment rate in my
district among African-American
men is 40 percent,” he told me.
“Forty percent!” And that doesn’t
count the many men serving hard
time in prison, often for victimless
drug crimes that carry stiff mandatory sentences. “The criminal
record makes it hard, if not impossible, for them to get jobs after
they get out,” he said.
Gun violence struck Cummings’
own family in 2011. Intruders shot
HUFFINGTON
07.28.13
“We have famous names of
outstanding achievement.
We have LeBron. We
have Jay Z. We have
Barack Obama. But that
is not a random sample.
What matters is the
undercurrent, and it’s
pulling our people down.”
— REV. JESSE JACKSON
and killed his 20-year-old nephew, Christopher Cummings, in an
off-campus apartment at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va.,
Two years later, no one has been
arrested. Christopher was a top
student, studying criminal justice.
At a memorial service in Baltimore, Cummings pleaded for an
end to violence in the black community. “I consider my nephew’s
murder a hate crime,” he told me,
his voice laced with bitterness.
“They hated his success.”
The story of Elijah Cummings
is a story of Black America in the
summer of 2013: rising visibility
a