United States Representative Elijah E. Cummings Post Office Building

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MFUME. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Maryland, the ranking member, for his kind and overly gracious remarks.

Mr. Speaker, in his absence, I thank Chairman Comer who made a commitment several months back that we would get to this point and for his cosponsorship of this bill. I thank my other colleagues from the State of Maryland, some of whom will be speaking today.

I rise in obvious support of this, encouraging Members of this body to embrace it and to say that the diligence and the collective commitment to your word to get us to this point means a lot to me. It is not lost on me. It is not lost on the people of the State of Maryland.

Mr. Speaker, this legislation designates the United States Postal Service facility, as you heard, located at 340 South Loudon Avenue in Baltimore, Maryland, as the United States Representative Elijah Cummings Post Office Building.

This legislation will bestow, I believe, a very fitting honor on a former chair of the Oversight Committee, former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, and, most importantly, an unwavering servant of the people in the House that we now all serve in.

His legacy, in many respects, lives through the work that he has done, and this legislation will ensure once and for all that his name will continue to be called by the people that he so dutifully served.

Mr. Speaker, Elijah Cummings, as was noted a moment ago, was born on January 18, 1951, to Ruth Elma and Robert Cummings, two South Carolina sharecroppers who moved to Baltimore in search of more opportunities during the period of the Great Migration.

Elijah's parents worked long and hard, as did many parents in that era, because they were up against so many things coming out of the Great Depression and out of a period of war that our Nation found itself in.

They worked and also served as preachers of a local church that both of them founded. With their teachings, his parents instilled in Elijah a sense of faith, justice, and morality that would go on to exemplify his four decades of public service.

While they were not formally educated in the traditional sense, Elijah's parents made certain that all of their children understood the importance and the essence of education. He tirelessly worked, as many of you know, over and over again to earn his Phi Beta Kappa key at Howard University and his juris doctorate degree at the University of Maryland School of Law.

Elijah knew that his story would ultimately illustrate the power of hard work and perseverance, and he always did that in a sense of believing that it would be the kind of message that young people who might be lost in many different ways would find a way to latch onto.

His values instilled in that generation, we believe, a whole new sense of public service. As a young lawyer in 1983, Elijah was elected and served with distinction in the Maryland House of Delegates. I might say, his personal credibility and relationships with members of that body existed then, and they still exist now.

He has, in many respects, given us the sort of model and the sort of example that we all talk about and many of us strive to attain.

In 1996, Elijah won his first of 12 elections to this body, assuming the seat that I had voluntarily vacated to head up the presidency of the NAACP.

Elijah's sense of fairness, his respect for others, and his relentless efforts to make life better for all people won him the respect and the admiration of his colleagues on this side of the aisle and his colleagues on that side of the aisle.

He and I were friends for 42 years up until the day of his death, and so I carry with me a lot of memorable moments of his congressional career, of the time that we served together on the board at Morgan State University, and as our people will tell you, as part of our organizations, our time together learning politics in the street, finding a way to organize and make a real difference.

He was the only person that I know of who continued to remind us that we could be better than this. I am so glad that Mr. Raskin brought that up.

Mr. Speaker, I am hoping I might get an additional 30 seconds here. I would like to conclude. I know we are running out of time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. MFUME. Mr. Speaker, in this time of national division and in this time of great partisanship, I am reminded of when we went through similar periods, and it was always Elijah Cummings on this side of the aisle and others who would remind us that we really were better than this, that we really did have a higher calling.

For me, personally, as a friend, as a former colleague, and as someone that I admired--even though he would tell you he admired me, I admired him even more--it is just a great honor to bring this bill forward. I would ask that it is adopted today, and I thank all of those Members who supported this, both Democrats and Republicans, and the sponsor.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source