Elijah E. Cummings (1951-2019 )

February 25, 2008 
/ Contributed By: Alton Hornsby

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Elijah E. Cummings

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U.S. Congressman Elijah E. Cummings was born in Baltimore, Maryland on January 18, 1951. He received a B.A. in political science from Howard University (Washington, D.C.) in 1973 and a J.D. from the University of Maryland (College Park) in 1976. Cummings, one of seven children of working-class parents who had migrated from a farm in South Carolina, grew up in a rental house, but often recalled the family โ€œscrimping and savingโ€ to buy their own home in a desegregated neighborhood. When the family moved into that home in 1963, when Cummings was twelve years of age, he recalled that he had โ€œnever played on grass before.โ€

Cummings won his first public office in 1983 when he was elected to the state House in Maryland. In 1995, he was named speaker pro tem, the highest state office ever held by a black Marylander. During his thirteen years in the Maryland legislature, Cummings achieved a reputation โ€œas both a dedicated liberal and a skilled census-builder.โ€ Cummings represented a predominately black district in West Baltimore where he was a supporter of better inner-city health care and gun control. He also worked to get private sector employers involved in partnerships with the government to enhance urban economic development and improve local schools, and he helped lead the fight to ban liquor advertisements from inner-city billboards. Cummings also led legislative efforts in the Maryland House to prevent and treat AIDS and to establish a โ€œboot campโ€ program to help former prison inmates find jobs. He pushed the connection of all schools, but especially those in minority communities, to the internet.

In February 1996, the popular Democratic incumbent in Marylandโ€™s Seventh District, Kwesi Mfume, resigned from the U.S. House to become president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Cummings won the Democratic primary defeating 26 black and white opponents.ย  Then, in April, he handily defeated his Republican opponent, Kenneth Konder, with more than 80 percent of the votes and earned the right to complete Mfumeโ€™s term in the 104th Congress.

During his first year in the Congress, Cummings sided with the liberal wing of his party. He voted against the welfare reform bill, against denying public education to illegal immigrants, and against allowing employers to offer their workers compensatory time off in lieu of overtime pay. He supported abortion rights, opposed term limits for officeholders and supported funding international aid and development programs without imposing abortion restrictions.

Elected to his thirteenth term in Congress in November 2018, Rep. Cummings also became chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which gave him wide-reaching authority to investigate the Trump administration.ย  In recent years, Cummings, a member of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, had suffered from health issues, including having a heart valve replacement in 2017. He died on October 17, 2019, at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore at the age of 68 years. He is survived by his wife Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, who is chair of the Maryland Democratic Party, and their children.

About the Author

Author Profile

Alton Hornsby Jr. earned a Bachelors degree in history from Morehouse College and M.A. and Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas (Austin), where he held a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, a Southern Education Foundation Fellowship and a University Fellowship. Professor Hornsby is Fuller E. Callaway Professor of History at Morehouse College. For 25 years (between 1976 and 2001), he edited the Journal of Negro History for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. He has also edited โ€œThe Papers of John and Lugenia Burns Hopeโ€ for Blackwellโ€™s Companion to African American History and the Dictionary of Twentieth Century Black Leaders. In 2004, he wrote the Introduction for the 17th edition of Whoโ€™s Who Among African Americans. Among his most recent works are A Short History of Black Atlanta, 1847-1990, โ€œSoutherners Too?: Essays on the Black South, 1773-1990,โ€ for the Dictionary of Twentieth Century Black Leaders (editor-in-chief and contributor), The Atlanta Urban League, 1920-2000 (with Alexa B. Henderson; winner of the Adele Mellon Prize for distinguished scholarship), A Biographical History of African Americans, and From the Grassroots: Profiles of Contemporary Black Leaders (with Angela M. Hornsby),

Hornsby has been president of the Association of Social and Behavioral Scientists and the Southern Conference on African American Studies. He has served on the executive council of the Association of Social and Behavioral Scientists, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) and the Southern Historical Association.

Dr. Alton Hornsby died in Atlanta, Georgia on September 1, 2017.

CITE THIS ENTRY IN APA FORMAT:

Hornsby, A. (2008, February 25). Elijah E. Cummings (1951-2019 ). BlackPast.org. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/cummings-elijah-e-1951-2/

Source of the Author's Information:

Alton Hornsby, Jr. and Angela M. Hornsby-Gutting, From the Grassroots:
Profiles of Contemporary African American Leaders
(Montgomery:
E-BookTime LLC, 2006).

Further Reading