He rose from crowded Harlem blocks and battlefield smoke to corridors of power that were never meant to remember the names he carried. Yet he walked them as if every marble hallway still ran along Lenox Avenue. He did not govern by polling or platitude, but by the ledger in his mind: overdue rent, empty refrigerators, school desks carved with boredom and quiet rage. That ledger never closed, and it turned committee rooms into battlegrounds for civil rights, housing protections, and paychecks that might finally stretch to the end of the month.

In Washington, he treated titles as tools, not trophies. He could cut through a bill’s fine print with the same blunt clarity he once used on a Harlem stoop, then turn and tease a colleague into courage. Now that his chair sits empty, the question he leaves behind is brutal in its simplicity: who still remembers people closely enough to fight for them that hard? His legacy lives wherever power chooses memory over spectacle, and duty over show.