On the recordOctober 21, 2019
To Elijah's wonderful wife and my friend, and to his children and family, we have said over and over again how much we will miss him, but we realize how much you will miss him. Elijah Cummings was my classmate. He came in during a special election, but we always viewed each other as classmates coming in the mid-1990s. His spirit was so strong that he was able to provide his own internal strength and also to provide strength for others. I think we knew about Elijah's parents more than anyone else. He talked about Robert and Ruth Cummings not only as sharecroppers but as preachers, and he talked about how they poured into his life. Elijah was a successful man though he started with a designation that he was slow in school. He was a Phi Beta Kappa, becoming Maryland's first African American speaker pro temp. {time} 2015 But what I know most about him is that Elijah would not want us to talk about all of those successes. He probably wouldn't even want us to talk about his being the powerful chairman of the Oversight and Reform Committee or talk about his work in criminal justice and ban the box that we worked together on, or even when he took a whole group of Members over to Baltimore when he first got elected because of the scourge of HIV/AIDS. He wanted us to see it; he wanted us to stand with him; and he wanted to show his community that he was going to fight on their behalf.…
