A bouquet of white tulips lay on the ground near the door. Four musicians from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra came to play some music, including an improvisation of “Amazing Grace,” one of Cummings’ favorites.
They were small, quiet gestures in the early hours after Cummings’ death Thursday morning — a kind of calm before the storm of formal mourning ceremonies to come. But they were also a testament to the power of the feeling that the people of Baltimore had for Cummings, a man who walked in the shoes of this city for much of his life.
“When I got the news this morning, tears were just streaming,” said the Rev. Alvin Hathaway, who with Cummings were black graduates from a mostly white high school in Baltimore in 1969. Hathaway was more interested in sports in those years, but Cummings pushed him to excel academically, telling him there was more at stake than his own school record.
“He kept us focused,” Hathaway said. “People don’t talk like that now. But he’d say, ‘We are leaders of our race. We are leaders of our community. We have to do the right thing.’ ”
He added, through tears: “That’s why everybody knew him, because he lived our journey. He was not apart from our journey. He lived our journey and he challenged us to excel in our journey.”
On a windy afternoon, residents recalled Cummings’ friendliness and enthusiasm for local haunts.
“He loved the meatballs,” said Sammy Curreri, owner of Sammy’s Trattoria on North Charles Street. Curreri said Cummings would often come in during the week.
“It would be early,” he said. “He would usually just shoot me a text around 5 p.m.”
He was famous in Baltimore, but he never acted like it, Curreri added.
Cummings was also a symbol of stability in a city that sometimes sorely lacked it. He served in Maryland’s House of Representatives from 1983 to 1996, the year he was elected to Congress from Maryland’s 7th District, which includes part of Baltimore. He was trained as a lawyer, but his passion was politics.
In the late 1960s, during the tumult of the civil rights movement, Cummings, still a teenager, got involved in helping elect the first African American judge in Baltimore.
“He was involved early on with our political growth, even before he graduated from Howard and went to law school,” Hathaway said.
He would go on to become a political powerhouse in Congress, where he stood out for his bipartisan inclinations.
Ralph Moore Jr., a veteran activist in Baltimore who teaches classes for adults getting their GED at Baltimore City Community College, said Cummings’ unflappable optimism sometimes frustrated him.
“He was a moderating influence,” Moore said. “He wanted this system to work. He believed in it. I guess from the vantage point of a congressman that makes sense. But he was mindful that from our vantage point in a city like Baltimore, you have to keep wondering how is this going to work.”
One example was Cummings’ response to President Donald Trump’s attack on Twitter this summer in which the president called his district a “rodent infested mess.”
Cummings replied calmly: “Mr. President, I go home to my district daily. Each morning, I wake up, and I go and fight for my neighbors.”
“He was being nice to him,” Moore said, “and I didn’t agree with him being nice to him.”
But that spirit is what made Cummings unique, his friends in Baltimore said Thursday.
He was “so much larger than who he was,” said Bishop Walter Thomas, the pastor of New Psalmist Baptist Church, a sprawling, cream-colored building in West Baltimore, where Cummings was a member and had attended services most Sundays for decades. “He was something so different,” Thomas said. “He was not the angry protester. He was not the passive peacemaker. He was the deliberate man who stood for right and wrestled wrong until right became the natural winner.”
Even after Cummings faced health challenges, he never lost his drive as a community activist, Thomas said.
Thomas remembered walking arm in arm with Cummings, trying to calm the crowds, during the riots after the funeral of Freddie Gray, who had died in police custody in 2015.
“He was sick that night, really sick, but he came out because he did not want to see a disruption in our city,” Thomas said. “He came out night after night after night until the city was at peace. That is who he was. That’s what he lived for. He was the underdog’s hero and the overlord’s threat. He was loved by all.”
He added, “In his own inimical way, living in Baltimore in the 7th Congressional District, he touched lives all over the world.”
Ray Kelly, the lead community liaison for the court-appointed monitoring team that is overseeing Baltimore’s compliance with mandated police reforms, said it was Cummings’ moral leadership in the era of Trump’s presidency that he will most remember.
“As this Trump administration came in, he kind of moved into the position for all black urban communities against those kinds of oppressive types of governance,” he said. “I think that will be his legacy.”
“I’m going to miss that champion,” he said. “It gives me pause to think who will step into that role with the passion and the vigor that Elijah Cummings had.”
This article originally appeared in
.