BREAKING: Rep. Elijah Cummings Dies at 68 Years Old
Democratic Congressman Elijah Cummings has died at 68 years old.
According to a press release from Cummings office, the Baltimore based Congressman passed at Johns Hopkins Hospital where he was receiving treatment at 2:45 AM, Thursday morning.
#Breaking from @RepCummings his office says he has passed away @wbalradio pic.twitter.com/CHRRR6QNo6
— Anne Kramer WBAL (@AnneKramerWBAL) October 17, 2019
The Washington Post elegized Cummings life:
Born to a family of Southern sharecroppers and Baptist preachers, Mr. Cummings grew up in the racially fractured Baltimore of the 1950s and 1960s. At 11, he helped integrate a local swimming pool while being attacked with bottles and rocks. “Perry Mason,” the popular TV series about a fictional defense lawyer, inspired him to enter the legal profession.
“Many young men in my neighborhood were going to reform school,” he told the East Texas Review. “Though I didn’t completely know what reform school was, I knew that Perry Mason won a lot of cases. I also thought that these young men probably needed lawyers.”
In the Maryland House of Delegates, he became the youngest chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus and the first African American to serve as speaker pro tempore, the member who presides in the speaker’s absence.
In 1996, he won the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives that Kweisi Mfume (D) vacated to become NAACP president. Mr. Cummings eventually served as chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and as ranking Democrat and then chairman of what became the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
He drew national attention as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief defender during 2015 congressional hearings into her handling of the attack three years earlier on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya. The attack killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
Cummings was a vocal critic of President Donald Trump and a frequent target of Trump’s animus as well.
Watch Morning Joe’s report of Cummings passing above via MSNBC.
