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Telling of Life Story Enlivens Mfume's Campaign
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"My mother died in my arms when I was 16 years of age," Mfume said.
He continued: "I was arrested time after time." He became a teenage parent. Then, he escaped that life. He left out, as he sometimes does, the details of the epiphany.
That led Mfume, as it always does, back to the present and to politics.
"We've got to say to young people, 'You are something,' " Mfume said.
It is a story that resonates at events such as that one, where most of the crowd was, like Mfume, black, as well as at others. Hearing his telling of his history made Mfume converts out of five white women from the Frederick area, Democratic activists who call themselves "the Catoctin Crones."
"You could just tell as he's going on that he's uncovering himself. He's discovering himself," said Susan Derse of Frederick. "It was beautiful."
The story has made impressions in churches and lecture halls -- Mfume made $174,000 from speaking engagements last year, according to a financial disclosure statement. It went over big at Leisure World in Montgomery County, in front of a largely white, largely elderly audience. People gasped when he mentioned that he had fathered five children out of wedlock.
But at the end, he received a standing ovation.
"He owned the room," said George L. Leventhal (D), chairman of the Montgomery County Council.
'He Wanted More'
The story begins here: Frizzell Gray was born in 1948 in Turners Station, a black community in Baltimore County. When he was 11, after his stepfather moved out, the family moved to West Baltimore. That neighborhood -- a swath of rowhouses that has decayed into a boarded-up, burned-out wasteland -- would be the setting for the toughest parts of his life.
It was there that his mother died at 40 in April 1965, collapsing in Frizzell's arms just a few months after telling her son that she had cancer.
And it was on those streets that, after his mother's death, Mfume said he fell into carrying guns, hanging out with gang members and fathering children. Between May 1968 and January 1970, he had five sons by four women.
