“Even when I am not at work, I’m at work, because I represent a public figure, and I work with my community all day, every day. It’s 24/7. I love what I do.”
Maurice A. Cummings brings the street lexicon into the corridors of political power. He is the archetypal boy-done-good story. This 39-year-old father of two is the special assistant to Assemblyman Keith L.T. Wright. Yet, Cummings does not sugarcoat his past. He spent 18 months in prison on a drug conviction in his 20s. A complete turnaround has him now in the halls of government at Harlem’s epicenter, the storied Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building.
Saying that he spends three quarters of his day in the office or interacting with youth and the community, the mentoring, volunteering special assistant to Wright–the Democratic state chair–his is a familiar face uptown.
Cummings looks unassuming–the kind of guy who could be either the one who called the meeting, the cat who is the subject of the meeting, the dude on post for security for the meeting or the city official sent to monitor the meeting. He has a comfortable swagger that is Bed-Stuy-Brooklyn-raised, Harlem-working, Panama- and North Carolina-tested.
“My friends call me Carlton Banks. Yeah–I can do the dance too,” he grins, “but I am able to switch up from the ‘hood to the halls of Albany, no problem. My friends know the real me.”
As he journeyed through that time of life when one finds one’s niche, Cummings had stints as a business owner and DJ with Brooklyn’s Finest (security and entertainment), a sales associate in a clothing store, a supervisor at a substance-abuse rehab center and a graphic designer with major advertising firms.
He studied finance at NYU and got into banking for a decade until he was hired to work on the Manhattan borough campaign of one Keith Wright. He was the deputy field director for the Wright for the Future campaign in 2005; one year later, he was the special assistant.
“I just got tired of numbers,” Cummings said of his decision to leave banking. “I love my job here, working with and for my community. I love being behind the scenes, oiling the engine of a handsome car.”
Humble but by no means punkified, Cummings explained that his “responsibilities working in the office of the assemblyman include getting the coffee, writing letters for the elected official, being the community liaison, participating in public speaking engagements and even going on humanitarian missions like taking supplies to the poor in the Dominican Republic or taking medical and dental supplies to earthquake-ravaged Haiti.”
Want to get him going? Talk about inner-city youth.
“I know these young people,” he smiles. “I love working with these young people. I mentor them, I work with them, go to the schools.
“I’m really involved in the Stop the Violence movement with regards to the gangs, especially with our annual anti-violence clinic. I work with the Rev. Vernon Williams, Iesha Sekou, Karriem Muhammad and Jackie Rowe Adams. I do it ’cause I’m from the streets, I’m from Bed-Stuy. I speak straight to the kids. They relate to me. I can directly understand what it is they are going through, what they might be feeling.”
Getting passionate, he says, “I try to urge them from a young age to make a decision about what it is they want to do in life, make sure that it is something that they love and pursue that.”
He taps that reliable axiom about how if your work is something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.
“I love the work I do. I don’t feel like I am coming to work every day. I feel like I am coming to contribute to a team, to an effort for the community, something of significance that will benefit the people that are coming behind me–especially our young Black males and females who nowadays don’t seem to have any direction and move with a lack of basic principles of how to conduct themselves. When I speak to them, it’s coming from the heart, it’s not something that I read.”
Now comes the revelation.
“I used to hustle. I am a former street person. I was incarcerated when I was 26, 27 years old on a drug conviction.” Coming out of that experience solid helps him know what motivates some of the kids to do what they do and what is needed to motivate them to come out of it. “I contribute my time to try and steer the youth in the right direction.”
His family is his everything. He has a 16-year-old son, Nasir, and a 4-year-old daughter, McKenzie.
“Nasir comes and volunteers with me,” he says proudly. “I want my legacy to be that I was a good father. I am in their lives, and they are my everything. I try and tell my son as a father all the things that a young man should know. We have candid conversations about everything–guns, sex and violence. I am very open and honest with my children.”
As for his own upbringing, he credits his grandmother Winifred for raising him to be the strong man who walks the world now. His own mother was lost to drugs, he says, and his father was a “functional drug addict, who went to work every day with a shirt and tie, but he hustled too–and he was murdered when I was 8 years old.”
His grandparents hail from Panama and North Carolina on his mother’s side and Ireland, Massachusetts and South Carolina on his father’s.
But, Grandma Winifred Cummings, he says, “is my guardian angel–she passed on September 11, 2007. My mom died six months later. I was very fortunate to have my grandparents in my life for most of my life, and they were without question the most influential part of my life.”
While stressing that a political career is not what he himself is looking for, he says he admires the fact that the assemblyman “wears many hats. He is chairman of the state, chairman of New York County, the assembly and he wears the labor committee hat.”
In that vein of trying to do the work for the people–but on a social, not political tip–Cummings states that 75 percent of his time is devoted to his work both official and in the community: “I contribute most of my time with regards to this office to try and steer the youth in the right direction. I love my job.”