Cummings on his father

This weekend, Matt Bai did a piece for the New York Times Magazine on the state of black politics in America, that seemed to focus on the divide between those who came up during and after the civil rights era in America.

And -- probably because there are so few of them still active in politics -- little mention went to those who came up in pre-civil rights America. Those like Rep. Elijah Cummings' father, whose reaction to his son's special election victory is recounted here.

Cummings, the former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and an early Obama supporter, told me a story about watching his father, a South Carolina sharecropper with a fourth-grade education, weep uncontrollably when Cummings was sworn in as a representative in 1996. Afterward, Cummings asked his dad if he had been crying tears of joy. “Oh, you know, I’m happy,” his father replied. "But now I realize, had I been given the opportunity, what I could have been. And I’m about to die."