As President Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union speech Tuesday evening, Feb. 4, and counted up the reasons he thinks Americans should love him, Kweisi Mfume counted up the ballots in the 7th U.S. Congressional District special primary election.
Were we witnessing the prelude to a political punchingmatch?
Mfume took a major step toward regaining the congressional seat he held more than 20 years ago, winning the Democratic primary over the late Rep. Elijah Cummings’ widow, Maya Rockeymoore Cummings, and 22 other candidates.
It’s a victory for Mfume -– and, maybe, for a certain kind of voice in Congress. It’s a voice up from the streets, a voice not afraid to take on entrenched power, a voice of passion and of conscience.
In other words, a voice like Elijah Cummings.
In his 1998 autobiography, “No Free Ride: From the Mean Streets to the Mainstream,” (Random House), Mfume wrote of the West Baltimore where he grew up, with its “buildings boarded up, the laundry hanging above row house stoops, pregnant teenage girls, and old folks peeking out from behind drawn window shades.
“For most Americans, these are the images of urban decay.For me and hundreds of thousands of African Americans across the nation, thesewere and are the symbols of home.”
They’re also the same symbols that remain today, nearly aquarter-century since Mfume wrote those words. They’re the “symbols” thatbrought Rep. Cummings and President Trump into verbal combat, when Trump calledWest Baltimore a “rodent-infested mess.”
In all his years in public life, Mfume was never known toduck a fight. But how much fight does he have left in him?
He was a street kid whose father slipped away early andwhose mother died, in Mfume’s arms, when Kweisi was a teenager. He took to thestreets, got himself into repeated trouble, but made his way to college and,eventually, politics.
He was a pugnacious figure on the Baltimore City Council -– but polished off his edges, learned to get along with such figures as the equally pugnacious Mayor William Donald Schaefer.
When he succeeded the late Parren Mitchell to win the 7th congressional seat, Mfume won such respect from colleagues that he became chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus.
In 1996, he left Congress to head the NAACP, and took itfrom political irrelevance and the poorhouse to economic stability. But he leftunder a cloud of workplace discrimination allegations.
There were many who urged Mfume to run for mayor ofBaltimore. It’s a tough, exhausting job, and there was talk that Mfume, at 71,wasn’t interested in such heavy lifting.
Does he still have enough fight in him to take on DonaldTrump? Those “symbols” of West Baltimore’s plight remain. Does the fire thatonce energized Mfume still burn?
If he didn’t have the inclination, to run for mayor ofBaltimore, does he still have the energy to take on the president of the UnitedStates?
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Commemorations of the Holocaust must transcend the past to include concerns about the present and future, writes Menachem Z. Rosensaft.
Someone needed to tell Donald Trump that his appearance at a UFC fight over the weekend was not a good look, writes Michael Olesker.
Journalists bear a responsibility to go beyond the headlines and social media posts to understand the past and present, writes New York University student Lucia Alonso.
The Trump administration's invoking of religion is reminiscent of the words and actions of one of history's most brutal Crusaders, writes Michael Olesker.