- Florida Senator Marco Rubio in a deleted tweet Saturday shared a photo of himself with the late Rep. Elijah Cummings by honoring Rep. John Lewis, who died Friday.
- The two lawmakers had often been confused with each other during their lives, so much so that Lewis in 2019 joked that he would grow his beard to differentiate himself from Cummings.
- Lewis, a civil rights icon, died Friday at age 80 after a stage IV pancreatic cancer attack.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
Florida Senator Marco Rubio, in a tweet Saturday, shared his thoughts on the death of civil rights icon Georgia Rep. John Lewis, who died Friday after a stage IV pancreatic cancer attack.
“It was an honor to meet and be blessed with the opportunity to serve in Congress with John Lewis, a true and historic American hero. May the Lord grant you eternal peace,” wrote the Florida Republican in a tweet on Saturday afternoon. .
But as many on Twitter were quick to point out, the image the Florida senator shared did not show him with Lewis, but with another deceased black lawmaker: Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, who died unexpectedly in October 2019 at the age of 68. years.
The photo was even briefly Rubio’s profile picture on Twitter before it disappeared along with his tweet.
In a deleted tweet, Florida Senator Marco Rubio wrote about the death of John Lewis, but attached a photo of the late Rep. Elijah Cummings.
Marco Rubio / Twitter
Rubio’s apparent anger was not the first time that the two deceased congressmen had mistaken each other. The two African-American lawmakers had become so confused with each other that in an April 2019 press release, Lewis wrote that he was considering growing a beard to distinguish him from his Maryland colleague.
In a follow-up tweet, Rubio acknowledged that he “tweeted an incorrect photo” and shared what appears to be an image of himself with Lewis from the 2017 appearance in Miami.
—Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 18, 2020
“Just this weekend, I went to church in Maryland,” Lewis said in a statement last year. “Someone came up to me and said, ‘Hello, Mr. Cummings. I vote for you all the time.’ I just said thank you. What else could I say? That’s when I decided I should let my beard grow.”
Lewis in the statement suggested that the comparisons were because both African-American lawmakers were bald and called those mistakes “bald.”
The CBS News to Fox News media have also previously confused the two lawmakers. Earlier this year, CBS News showed a photo of Cummings, who had already died, during a segment on “CBS Evening News” about Lewis’s cancer diagnosis.
“People stop me all the time and tell me they’re from Maryland,” Lewis wrote in the April 2019 statement. “I’m John Lewis from Georgia. Rep. Cummings is a good friend of mine, but we are not the same person. “
“I thought about getting a tattoo on the back of my head, just to clear things up. I tried to convince Elijah to get one too, but that wasn’t so good.”
Read more:
More than 398,000 people have signed a petition to rename the Edmund Pettus Bridge to the late civil rights icon, Representative John Lewis
President Obama mourns the death of civil rights leader John Lewis: “We all have our orders to march”
Representative John Lewis, civil rights icon, was a powerful voice against the war with Iraq
Nancy Pelosi, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and more mourn the death of civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis, who died in the 1980s
