Welcoming the Honorable Kweisi Mfume to the House of Representatives

Floor Speech

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Mr. MFUME. Madam Speaker, I thank the majority leader for his kind and overly gracious remarks.

Madam Speaker, I rise to offer my heartfelt thanks and my deepest appreciation to the people of Maryland's Seventh Congressional District for the high honor and the distinct privilege of again representing them here in the Congress of the United States.

I am happy to have been joined by members of our distinguished delegation from the State of Maryland, and I appreciate their presence here among us.

I thank Almighty God for the victory and for my wonderful family and friends. I am joined here in the gallery by my wife, Dr. Tiffany Beth Mfume, and a longtime family friend, attorney Eric Bryant, and others.

I am honored by those supporters who are Black and White, Latino and Asian, who could not be here at this time but who have worked so very hard to make sure that this moment would be possible. And I believe, as they do and as we continue to do, that racism, sexism, and anti- Semitism are wrong, that Black bigotry can be just as cruel and evil as White bigotry, that gay bashing, immigrant bashing, and union bashing ultimately deplete us as a Nation and rob us of our ability to make true and lasting change.

Today marks my return to this body after 24 years and following the death of the Honorable Elijah Cummings, my friend of 42 years. I do so against the backdrop of COVID-19 and in the midst of our Nation's greatest health crisis of the 21st century.

Simultaneously, we are also locked in the Nation's greatest economic collapse, where there are now families and individuals who haven't had a paycheck in weeks as they struggle to buy food and to pay bills.

Madam Speaker, our challenges as a Nation at this hour, as you and others know better than I, are economic, educational, social, and systemic, and they require both the courage of conviction and the unwavering resolve that the American spirit has always exhibited in order to solve them.

Thus, in yielding back my time, I call forth the words of Dr. James Cheek, when he so eloquently exclaimed: ``I have not given up on the American idea or on the American possibility, and I ask my colleagues in this body not to give up also.

``I am convinced that our Nation still stands before the world as perhaps the last expression of a possibility of mankind devising a social order where justice is the supreme ruler, and law is but its instrument; where freedom is the dominant creed, and order . . . but its principle; where equity is the common practice, and fraternity the true human condition.''

It is against that backdrop that I welcome and embrace both this challenge and opportunity before me.

Madam Speaker, I thank you and I thank the distinguished majority leader for his words of introduction.

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