STOLEN LEGACY
Honesty and integrity matter. They have always been important. And it is especially true now, because people’s lives literally depend on honest information from their leaders. With that point in mind, I want to share a story. It’s a good story, but one that is built on a foundation of untruth.
A Congressman abruptly resigns, ostensibly to save the financially struggling NAACP, and calls then Maryland House of Delegates legislator Elijah Cummings to urge him to run for his seat. It’s a story that Kweisi Mfume has often told on the campaign trail, likely to establish his credibility as a friend worthy of following in Elijah’s footsteps after his untimely death on October 17, 2019. The only problem is the story is not true.
I’ve known Elijah since 1998. We were not just married, we were best friends. He often recounted to me how he came to Congress; who supported him and who did not. For example, Elijah expressed hurt that his “mentor” Larry Gibson — Mfume’s current campaign strategist — didn’t support his run for Congress and told him he could never win against Bethel AME Pastor Frank Reid, a candidate considered a front runner in the 1996 special election held to replace Mfume. Boy, was Professor Gibson wrong!
Mr. Mfume’s story of early support and encouragement was never a part of Elijah’s narrative. But you don’t have to take my word for it. You can read it for yourself in Elijah’s forthcoming book where he tells how he learned of Mr. Mfume’s resignation and made the decision to run for Congress.
There’s another story that Mr. Mfume told at a news conference announcing his Congressional run, which the Baltimore Sun reprinted in a November 4, 2019 byline by Luke Broadwater, in which Mr. Mfume says he spoke with me about the race before announcing his run. This is a lie, likely told to make it seem as if he were being deferential to a grieving widow. The truth is Mr. Mfume and I never spoke about the race.
Elijah was friendly with Mr. Mfume but he didn’t consider him a friend. In fact, he often said he didn’t trust him and that if Mr. Mfume was involved, it was likely because Mr. Mfume stood to personally benefit. Elijah, who had the gift of spiritual discernment, often said that it bothered him that he couldn’t feel Mr. Mfume’s spirit.
That didn’t mean Elijah didn’t respect the former Congressman or even his leadership of the Morgan State University Board, where they served together for a number of years. It also didn’t hinder him from selecting Mr. Mfume to be one of the speakers at his funeral service. He told me that he felt that the people of Baltimore would expect Mr. Mfume to speak. But if Elijah would have known how Mfume would conduct himself after his passing, he most certainly would not have given him the honor.
Mr. Mfume’s behavior is nothing new. Reams of print have been dedicated to the stonewalling, half-truths, and equivocation he used to defend his tenure at the NAACP where two separate internal investigations highlighted the toxic environment of sexism and sexual exploitation that prevailed under his leadership. So prevalent was the culture that when Michele Speaks threatened a sexual harassment lawsuit against Mfume in 2004, the NAACP decided to settle because an independent investigator suggested she would likely prevail in a court of law (full disclosure: while I did not know Michele at the time, she and I became friends in 2015 and she and her spouse are donors to my campaign).
But these incidents pale in comparison to one of the greatest travesties of Mfume’s tenure in Congress: his support for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, also known as the 94 crime bill. As Chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus at the time, Mr. Mfume’s influence extended far beyond his individual vote for the crime bill. He actively rallied CBC members to vote for the bill even as he conveniently failed to secure the Caucus’s priority of The Racial Justice Act, a bill that would have given death row defendants the ability to use statistical data to demonstrate racial bias in the application of capital punishment, in exchange for their votes.
Most critics of Mfume’s crime bill vote focus on its impact, which incentivized the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of mostly black and brown men primarily for non-violent drug offenses. At least two generations of Baltimore families have been traumatized and stripped of wealth and opportunities because of its devastating effects. But the lost opportunity of The Racial Justice Act shouldn’t be ignored.
In her award-winning book, The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes two steps for how our so called color-blind criminal justice system produces consistently racist results. The first step is granting law enforcement broad discretion in who to stop, search, arrest, and charge; practically ensuring that explicit and implicit racial biases prevail in decision making. The second step is to prevent defendants and private litigants from using evidence of systemic racial bias as a courthouse defense.
The work of Bryan Stevenson, highlighted in the recent film Just Mercy, has shown how innocent — mostly black, brown and low income death row defendants — have been railroaded by a rigged system. When he gave up fighting for The Racial Justice Act, Mr. Mfume literally helped put a nail in their coffins by denying them a defense that could have allowed them to live.
As a nation we are watching Donald J. Trump use smoke and mirrors to hide his pattern of lies and deceit to destroy our democracy. If bad character matters with Trump, it should also matter with Kweisi Mfume. Baltimore has a lot of needs, including the need for truth from its elected officials and policies that deliver justice. Mr. Mfume has shown that he’s incapable of delivering on either count.
Dr. Maya Rockeymoore Cummings is a candidate for U.S. Congress in Maryland’s 7th Congressional District. She is the former Chair of the Maryland Democratic Party.
