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Commentary: Job in Fattah office was start of public-service career

By Lester Davis My stomach dropped Tuesday afternoon as I learned that my former boss and onetime mentor, U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, had been convicted on charges stemming from a federal racketeering case.

By Lester Davis

My stomach dropped Tuesday afternoon as I learned that my former boss and onetime mentor, U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, had been convicted on charges stemming from a federal racketeering case.

I periodically followed Fattah's legal challenges, dating back to early 2014, when federal prosecutors subpoenaed documents from his congressional offices in connection with questions surrounding nonprofit organizations linked to the congressman. But I failed to fully appreciate the gravity of his situation until last Tuesday afternoon, when I stared blankly at a news alert that popped up on my cellphone announcing his conviction.

I lost my breath for a moment and sank in my chair as I considered his fate and tarnished reputation.

Fattah spent a generation nurturing countless individuals, many of whom formed a kind of political galaxy, with the congressman serving as our gravitational force.

For the last 17 years, I proudly spun in Fattah's universe until Tuesday's announcement sent me sputtering into a black hole.

I met the congressman nearly two decades ago as a 16-year-old rising senior attending high school in Washington. I was selected to participate in an internship program operated by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and was placed in the congressman's Washington office for a seven-week internship that would change my life.

I grew up in a poor section of Northeast Washington. My only access to the city's monuments and museums came through images displayed on my television screen, and often the people depicted looked nothing like me or my neighbors. I'd never set foot inside one of Capitol Hill's House office buildings, which were less than six miles from my childhood home.

Without the benefit of Internet access, and having done zero research on the congressman, I entered his office in the Rayburn building one Monday in June 1999 expecting him - based on my stereotypical understanding of his name - to be an African female, not a bespectacled Philadelphia man whose charming grin emanated an infectious self-confidence.

I encountered the congressman a handful of times during my summer internship. He always displayed more interest in me than someone in his position should have reasonably been expected to show. I took notice and began to dream.

Until my internship, never before had I been surrounded by so many educated people of color. His office served as a living counter to the environment I'd been raised in. Mine was a place where students were regularly suspended from school, dropped out in droves, or too often wound up dead or in jail.

I found Fattah to be a down-to-earth politician who delighted in helping staffers pursue graduate studies and then encouraged them to seek leadership positions that would allow them to help greater numbers of the disadvantaged.

I wanted to be a part of that world.

At the end of my seven weeks, I left his office with confidence and a new sense of self-determination - long dormant but newly awakened.

I split my senior year of high school between morning classes and afternoon internships at a pair of well-respected public-relations firms. I'd harbored notions of attending college, but that experience in the summer of '99 convinced me that higher education was nonnegotiable. I credit in large part the atmosphere inside Fattah's office - a place stocked with highly educated workers determined to use the legislative process for good - for lighting a spark that propelled me to a four-year university.

It was only fitting that after graduating with an undergraduate degree, I accepted an entry-level position in Fattah's D.C. office. I credit my time spent working for the congressman among the most professionally fulfilling periods of my early career.

I went on, like so many before me, to leave Fattah's office to pursue my dreams - in my case to become a reporter at a daily newspaper. The congressman didn't protest. He said he was sad to see me go but that he was proud that I decided to follow my passion. He encouraged me to seek a path that would allow me to give back to the public and told me stories about his mother, who had worked as a journalist.

We lost contact in the intervening years, but I'm convinced Fattah is still the same caring individual that Philadelphia has depended on for the better part of his 30-year career, and who an aimless teenager from inner-city Washington used as a guidepost for a career of public service.

Lester Davis is deputy chief of staff and communications director for the president of the Baltimore City Council. lesterdavis926@gmail.com