Representative Elijah Cummings Has Died at 68

“Our children are the living messages we send to a future we will ever see....Will we rob them of their destiny? Will we rob them of their dreams? No—we will not do that,” U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings of Baltimore once declared. His fierce commitment to making this country a better, fairer place and his willingness to fight injustice and speak truth to power were the cornerstones of a remarkable life.

The congressman, who passed away this morning at the age of 68 after complications related to health issues, was most recently a key figure in the Trump impeachment hearings, calling the president’s efforts to block the investigation “far worse than Watergate.” As chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, he spent what would be the last months of his life fighting to bring the truth of the Trump administration’s activities to light.

But Cummings stood for far more than that. During his long and storied career in public service, he campaigned for stricter gun laws and lower drug prices; he fought Trump’s draconian policies at the southern border, decrying what he described as “child internment camps.” In 2002, he was among the minority of members of Congress who voted against authorizing a military invasion of Iraq.

And he was a tireless advocate for his hometown, the city of Baltimore. In 2015, he delivered the eulogy for Freddie Gray, who died at the hands of police. After the church service, Cummings took to the streets, attempting to calm angry crowds. His bullhorn bore the words, “The gentleman will not yield,” a gift from his fellow Democrats, given to him after a Republican congressman silenced Mr. Cummings’s microphone at a 2014 hearing.

Elijah Cummings was born in Baltimore in 1951, one of seven children. His parents were former sharecroppers who migrated north. “You have to understand—I come from a neighborhood where The Wire was filmed,” he once recalled. He came to his activism early: When he was 11, white mobs threw rocks and bottles at him and other children attempting to integrate a swimming pool in South Baltimore. He said he got the idea of becoming a lawyer from watching Perry Mason. “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.”

The proprietor of a drugstore where he worked during the school year paid his application fee to Howard University. Cummings graduated Phi Beta Kappa—he was student government president—with a degree in political science. He earned a law degree from the University of Maryland and was a practicing attorney while serving for 14 years in the Maryland House of Delegates, where he was the first African American in the state’s history to be named speaker pro tem. In 1996, Cummings won a special election to fill the congressional seat vacated by Kweisi Mfume, who resigned to become president of the NAACP. He remained a member of Congress until his passing.

Cummings often told the story of how his mother had witnessed Americans being beaten while seeking the right to vote. “Her last words were, ‘Do not let them take our votes away from us,’” he remembered. His death represents a profound loss in the current dark landscape. Let us honor this great man’s memory by heeding his mother’s words.

Originally Appeared on Vogue