Congressman Elijah E. Cummings Proudly Representing Maryland's 7th District

(7/15/00 Baltimore AFRO-American Newspaper)

My soul has grown deep like the rivers
In Memoriam - John J. Oliver, Sr.

by Congressman Elijah E. Cummings

John J. Oliver, Sr., was a great man who touched my life when I was young, helping me in ways I will never forget. When he died on June 30 at the age of 87, people throughout the country bowed their heads in respect.

Paul Evans, a former editor of the AFRO American, captured the essential dignity of the newspaper's long-time publisher when he recalled that John Oliver "was a man of honor and principle, but low-key and unassuming."

Last Saturday, as I listened to the eulogies and paid my respects to the Oliver and Murphy families during John Oliver's funeral, those were the very words that guided my thoughts and feelings. I thought about honor and principle, about humility and dignity, and I recalled my own memories of this great man.

John Oliver and the AFRO gave me my first regular job. As a child, I worked as an "Afro-boy," delivering the newspaper on Tuesday and Friday each week.

Later, when I graduated from Baltimore City College High School, Mr. Oliver published a front page article that I cherish to this day. It commended me for academic achievement and predicted that I would have a great future.

What really touched my heart, though, was a single act of consideration. John Oliver called me at the time the article was published. "I am excited about your possibilities," he told me, encouraging me to attend college.

To someone who does not know what it was like to grow up black and poor in Baltimore during the 1950s and 1960s, these may seem like simple memories of no great consequence. They are important to me, however, as they should be to every American of color.

We must remember the debt we owe to the black press and the men and women of John Oliver's generation. Ours is an obligation more profound than we could ever hope to repay.

When I delivered newspapers for Mr. Oliver and the AFRO, he was at the height of his 47 year career with the paper - a lifetime relationship that began in 1935 during the Great Depression. To fully appreciate the intellectual prominence of the paper during John Oliver's youth, we need only recall that the world-renowned poet, Langston Hughes, was an AFRO correspondent in 1937.

During the decades that followed, men and women like Hughes and Oliver in black newspapers across the country chronicled our migration from the sharecropping fields of the South into the factories of the North. With bitter irony, they noted that we still worked to create wealth we did not own.

During World War II, the black press documented the heroism of our soldiers, sailors and airmen - valor that the majority press largely ignored. Then, during the Red Scares of the 1950s, newspapers like the AFRO were forced to struggle against both financial pressure and attacks by the agents of the McCarthy era.

Under John Oliver, the newspaper survived, and when I first began reading it, Mr. Oliver and his colleagues were exposing the brutal face of Jim Crow and the fundamental unfairness of segregation. Before Selma and Birmingham, they helped to provide the social and intellectual foundations for protest and the movement toward civil rights.

In the words of "Soldiers without Swords," Stanley Nelson's controversial 1998 documentary for PBS, the black press "gave a voice to the voiceless."  They gave us the news we needed to know when no one else would declare the truth about our lives.

For families like my own, new to Baltimore from the fields of South Carolina, the AFRO offered us the vision of a powerful business, owned and controlled by black men and women of intellect, education and courage. By his example, John Oliver helped to create in me the very possibilities he would one day applaud.

John Oliver's generation spent their lives uplifting ours. Now, Mr. Oliver's one-time newspaper carrier writes for the paper he guided so well.

I will always remember him, though, by Langston Hughes' words, not by my own.

By his principles and compassion, John Oliver touched my soul -- so that I, too, would grow deep like the rivers.

-The Honorable Elijah E. Cummings represents the 7th Congressional District of Maryland in the United States House of Representatives.

RETURN TO ARTICLES / COLUMNS