Floor Statements

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor my dear friend, Attorney Virgil L. Adams of Macon, Georgia, upon his selection by the Central Georgia Council, Boy Scouts of America, to receive its Distinguished Citizen Award--an honor reserved for those whose service has made Middle Georgia a better place to live, to work, and to raise a child.

Mr. Speaker, Virgil Adams is a son of Macon. He is also a proud son of Albany State University, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1977 with a degree in psychology before earning his Juris Doctor from the Walter F. George School of Law at Mercer University in 1980. He began his legal career as an Assistant District Attorney for the Macon Judicial Circuit, where he tried some of the most serious cases in that community, and in 1987 he entered private practice. Today he is a partner in the firm of Adams, Jordan and Herrington, P.C., with offices in Macon, Milledgeville, and Albany, where he has spent four decades standing beside families who suffered catastrophic loss and had nowhere else to turn. He also served for many years as County Attorney for Bibb County.

Mr. Speaker, the legal profession has taken careful notice of him. He was named Lawyer of the Year by the Macon Bar Association in 2001. He has held Martindale-Hubbell's highest AV rating throughout his career, has been named a Super Lawyer since 2012, and has been recognized among the Top 100 Trial Lawyers by the National Trial Lawyers Association. He served on the Board of Governors of the State Bar of Georgia, which honored him for his leadership in 2014 and presented him its Tradition of Excellence Award in 2020. In 2017 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers--an honor extended by invitation only--and in 2023 he was appointed Chairman of its Georgia State Committee. In 2025, the Macon Bar Association presented him with the Judge William Augustus Bootle Professionalism Award. But Mr. Speaker, the Boy Scouts did not choose him for what hangs on his wall. They chose him because of a small chair in an elementary school classroom.

Through the 100 Black Men of Macon-Middle Georgia, of which he is a charter member, Virgil Adams mentors students at Bruce Elementary School. So it is that a man who has stood before juries in cases of life and death, a man whose calendar is claimed by trustees and boards and bar associations across this state, will fold himself into a chair built for a seven-year-old and read a book out loud, one page at a time, and listen while a child reads it back to him. That child does not know he is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. That child does not know what an AV rating is. That child knows only that a grown man came, that he sat down, and that he came back again the next time. Mr. Speaker, the Scout Oath asks a young person to promise ``to help other people at all times.'' Virgil Adams has been keeping that promise in Middle Georgia for 40 years, and he has kept it most faithfully where no camera was rolling and no fee was charged.

He has given that same measure of himself to NewTown Macon, to the Community Foundation of Central Georgia, which he chaired, to the Board of Trustees of Mercer University, to the Albany State University Foundation, to Middle Georgia Justice, to Macon Hope, and to First Tee--Middle Georgia. He is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated. And together with his wife, Paula Shipp Adams, a retired educator, he has invested in the Otis Redding Center for the Arts--so that in the city that gave the world Otis Redding, another Macon child with a gift and no other door might find one open.

Mr. Speaker, the bar of this state has taken notice of that work as well. Virgil Adams was recently presented the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 26th Annual Justice Robert Benham Awards for Community Service--the highest recognition conferred through those awards. The Benham Awards were established in 1997 by the Executive Committee of the State Bar of Georgia to honor lawyers and judges who have made outstanding contributions in service to their communities, and they

carry the name of the Honorable Robert Benham, who in 1989 became the first African American appointed to the Supreme Court of Georgia and who served as its Chief Justice from 1995 to 2001.

Mr. Speaker, that is a fitting name to attach to this man's life. Justice Benham reached a place on that Court where no one who looked like him had ever stood, and he spent his years there making certain he would note the last. Virgil Adams has done the same work in the courtrooms of Middle Georgia. He earned an award given in Justice Benham's name the only way it can be earned--not by what he has won, but by what he has given away.

Mr. Speaker, the founder of Albany State University, Dr. Joseph Winthrop Holley, gave his memoir a title that has outlived him: ``You Can't Build a Chimney from the Top'' Dr. Holley opened that school in 1903 with almost nothing, in a Georgia that had no intention of helping him, because he understood that anything built to stand must be built from the bottom--one stone, one child, one year at a time. Virgil Adams is what that chimney looks like when it is finished. To his everlasting credit, he keeps climbing back down to the bottom to lay stone for somebody else.

Mr. Speaker, I have known Virgil Adams a long time, and I can tell this House that the honor he receives tonight is not the beginning of his service. It is only Middle Georgia's belated way of saying thank you.

Therefore, Mr Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join my wife Vivian and me, along with the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's 2nd Congressional District in congratulating Attorney Virgil L. Adams upon receiving the Distinguished Citizen Award from the Central Georgia Council, Boy Scouts of America, and upon his recognition with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 26th Annual Justice Robert Benham Awards for Community Service, in thanking Paula and their family for sharing him with us, and in wishing him continued success in all his future endeavors.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor Albany Technical College of Albany, Georgia, on the occasion of its 65th anniversary.

Mr. Speaker, in 1961 this institution opened its doors as the Monroe Area Vocational Technical School with 175 students. One hundred seventy-five. In a segregated South Georgia, in a year when very few people in authority believed that the children of sharecroppers and mill hands and domestic workers needed anything more than a strong back, somebody in Albany, Georgia, decided otherwise.

The Albany Area Vocational-Technical School followed shortly after, and in 1972 the two schools were joined together at the campus the college occupies today. In July of 1988, with the formation of what is now the Technical College System of Georgia, the school became Albany Technical Institute and was charged with serving a seven-county region--Baker, Calhoun, Clay, Dougherty, Lee, Randolph, and Terrell-- some of the most rural and most economically challenged counties in the United States of America. And on July 6, 2000, having met the standard set by the General Assembly in House Bill 1187 to award the associate degree, Albany Technical Institute became Albany Technical College.

Mr. Speaker, 65 years is a long time to keep a promise. It has been kept by every person who ever led this institution by President Howard Water, by President Wayne Israel, by President Nathaniel Cross, by President Alvin Anderson, by President Dr. Anthony O. Parker, and today by Dr. Emmett L. Griswold--and by every instructor who ever stood in a shop with a clipboard and refused to let a student quit.

Mr. Speaker, you cannot tell the story of this college without telling the story of two men.

Dr. Anthony O. Parker became the fifth president of Albany Technical College in 1995, arriving in a community still digging itself out from the great flood of 1994, and he led the rebuilding. He stayed for 27 years--the longest-serving president in the history of the college and the longest-serving president in the entire Technical College System of Georgia. He built the enrollment. He built the buildings. He built partnerships with the Marine Corps Logistics Base and with industry across this region. He was among the first technical college presidents in Georgia to raise a million dollars in private money for his campus. And he never stopped fighting for adult learners--for the grown man and the grown woman who walked in for a GED and walked out with a career.

Mr. Speaker, in November of 2011, I stood on that campus as Albany Tech dedicated its new library and media center in Dr. Parker's honor. I read a tribute to him into this very Record that day, and I presented him a flag that had flown over this Capitol in his name. He told us then why that building meant what it meant to him: his mother had been a librarian, and as a boy he was made to stop at the county library and study on his way home before he was ever allowed to go outside and play. He said that at the time he did not appreciate it. He said that he had come to appreciate it very much.

Mr. Speaker, on the morning of June 6, 2022, Dr. Anthony Parker passed away. He was 69 years old. He did not retire. He did not slow down. He had plans on the books for the next 5 years. He simply did not come to work one morning, and Southwest Georgia has not stopped missing him since.

Here, Mr. Speaker, is the part of this story that I want the House to hear.

In 2004, a man named Emmett Griswold walked through the front door of Albany Technical College to teach criminal justice. He had come out of law enforcement and corrections--a probation and parole officer for the Georgia Department of Juvenile Justice, a deputy warden for the Georgia Department of Corrections--a man whose working life had been spent among people the world had already given up on. He was a native of Milledgeville who had made Albany his home.

He held his bachelor's and master's degrees from Albany State University, and he would go on to earn his doctorate from Valdosta State.

Dr. Parker took him under his wing. And Dr. Griswold rose--department chairman, dean of academic affairs, vice president for academic affairs, executive vice president--every rung of it, at the same institution, for 18 years.

When the college lost its president without warning, Albany Tech did not have to look outside for somebody to carry it. He was already there. On November 1, 2022, Dr. Emmett L. Griswold became the sixth president of Albany Technical College, standing on the foundation laid by his mentor and his friend.

Mr. Speaker, that is what 65 years of an institution actually looks like. Not a building. Not a seal. A man who taught, mentored, and believed in another man--who then took up the same work and kept the doors open for the next one.

Those doors, Mr. Speaker, have never asked a single student what their father did for a living. They have opened for the single mother working nights. For the man laid off at 45 who had to start over. For the young person nobody expected anything from, who is today a lineman, a nurse, a welder, a diesel technician, a logistics specialist--who owns a home, pays taxes, and raises children who will never know what it was to go without.

That is the harvest of 65 years in Southwest Georgia.

Therefore, Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating Albany Technical College on sixty-fiye years of service, in commending President Emmett L. Griswold, his faculty, his staff, and his Board of Directors, in honoring the memory of Dr. Anthony O. Parker and all who led before him, and in wishing this great institution many more years of transforming lives across Southwest Georgia.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a remarkable daughter of the State of Georgia, Ms. Johnnie Brooks Booker of Atlanta, on the occasion of her 85th birthday. A celebration of her birthday was held on Saturday, September 12, 2026, at the Whitley Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia.

Mr. Speaker, Johnnie Brooks was born on July 31, 1941, in Forsyth, Georgia, to Willie Floyd Brooks and Lillian Goodwyne Brooks Graves. I would ask this House to sit with that date for a moment. Nineteen forty-one. In Georgia. A Black girl, born in a small middle Georgia town, into a state that had already written her ceiling before she drew her first breath--a state where she could not have been served at a lunch counter in her own hometown, could not have used the front door of most buildings on Main Street, and could not have expected the country of her birth to make room for her. Nobody asked that child what she intended to do about it. She told them anyway.

She went to Hampton Institute in Virginia and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in social sciences and sociology. She went on to the Atlanta University School of Social Work--now Clark Atlanta University--and earned her Master of Social Work in community organization. And then, Mr. Speaker, she went to work, and she did not stop for sixty years.

She began with the New York Department of Welfare. She taught in the Manpower Development and Training Program in Washington, D.C. and joined the D.C. Department of Rehabilitation in 1964. She served with the Neighborhood Youth Corps. She worked with the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency, then the Western Regional Office of the National Urban League, and then the Urban League's Washington Bureau.

She entered the federal service at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board as Director of Consumer Affairs and Civil Rights. In 1989 she was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary at the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 1991, she joined the Resolution Trust Corporation as Vice President of the Division of Minority and Women`s Programs. When that agency closed its doors, she moved to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation as Director of the Office of Equal Opportunity, where she served until her retirement in 1996.

Mr. Speaker, I want my colleagues to notice something about that list. Consumer Affairs and Civil Rights. Minority and women's programs. Equal Opportunity. Community Organization. Look at every title she ever held. That woman spent her entire working life standing in doorways and holding them open for people who were never supposed to get through.

Mr. Speaker, the late Shirley Chisholm sat in this very House, and she left behind a line that the women who came after her have carried like a lantern: ``if they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.''

Johnnie Brooks Booker heard that. But she was never once satisfied to bring a single chair for herself. She brought them by the truckload. She set them up around the table. She called in people whose names were nowhere on the invitation--and then she taught them how to sit there like they belonged, because they did. She was not finished.

In 2001 she came home to Georgia and became the Global Director of Supplier Diversity at The Coca-Cola Company, where she served for a decade. In that role she built a mentoring program for minority- and women-owned business enterprises because she understood that a contract without capacity is a courtesy, and she was never interested in courtesies. She wanted those firms to be able to bid the next job, and the one after that, without her. Mr. Speaker, in 2007, came the moment I want this House to remember.

When The World of Coca-Cola Museum was built in Atlanta--that great glass house where one of the most famous American companies on earth tells the story of itself--Johnnie Brooks Booker made certain that minority developers and minority contractors were in the room, on the plans, and on that job site.

Think about what that means. A little girl born in Forsyth, Georgia, in 1941, who as a child that could not walk into a drugstore in her own town and sit down and order a CocaCola--that same woman, 66 years later, helped decide who would build the house that Coca-Cola tells its story in.

Mr. Speaker, that is not irony. That is what a life of purpose looks like from the far end of it.

She retired from Coca-Cola in 2012, at an age when most people are owed their rest, and promptly founded The Johnnie Booker Group, where she serves as President and Chief Executive Officer to this day.

Her service has extended to the American Society for Public Administration, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated, The Links, Incorporated, the National Council of Negro Women, the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Hampton University Alumni Association, the Utopian Literary Club, and Circle-Let's of Atlanta. She has served on the boards of the National Minority Supplier Development Council, the Women's Business Enterprise National Council, Women in Housing and Finance, Women of Washington, the Delta Research and Educational Foundation--the philanthropic arm of her beloved sorority--and the Fort Valley State University Foundation--an institution in the district I am privileged to represent, and one more place where she invested herself in young people she would never meet.

She has been recognized with two Congressional Resolutions of this House, named Hampton University Alumna of the Year in 2009, and honored with the Community Service Award of the Black Law Students Association at Quinnipiac University in 2022. In 2023,

she sat for an oral history with The History Makers--so that her voice will still be telling this story long after all of us in this Chamber have finished ours.

Mr. Speaker, she is the mother of S. Courtney Booker, III and the grandmother of Dalyn and Aiden. I would say this to those two grandchildren: the world will tell them a great many things about what they can and cannot become. Their grandmother has already proven every one of them wrong. They come from somebody.

Mr. Speaker, on the 31st of July, Ms. Johnnie Brooks Booker turned 85 years old. She has lived long enough to see a great deal of what she fought for, and she is still at her desk. Georgia gave her to the Nation, and she has spent 85 years giving back more than she ever received.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join my wife, Vivian, and me, along with the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's 2nd Congressional District in wishing a happy 85th birthday to Ms. Johnnie Brooks Booker of Atlanta, Georgia, in thanking her for a lifetime of extraordinary service to this country, and in wishing her continued health, joy, and many more years among the people who love her.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a man I have known, admired, and leaned upon for the better part of my life in public service--the Honorable Ed Harbison, Dean of the Georgia State Senate, who gave thirty-four years to the people of the Fifteenth Senate District. The community he served for a lifetime gathers once more to say thank you Mr. Speaker, some men are handed a title. A rare few are handed a trust. Ed Harbison was handed a trust, and he never once set it down.

Long before he ever rose to speak beneath the Gold Dome, Ed Harbison wore the uniform of the United States Marine Corps. He went to Vietnam. He came home with a Purple Heart and with wounds that no ceremony can undo. I begin there, Mr. Speaker, because everything that followed makes sense only in that light. A young man who was willing to lay down his life for strangers came home and spent the lest of his days giving his hours, his patience, and his heart to his neighbors. For Ed Harbison, service was never a campaign word It was a scar he carried and a promise he kept.

Mr. Speaker, I know the seat Ed Harbison held, because I sat in it before him. When the people of Georgia sent me to this House in 1993, I left that Fifteenth District seat behind--and I did not leave it to chance. I left it to Ed. For thirty-four years, West Central Georgia has been better for that decision than for almost any I ever made. He became the longest-serving member of that chamber and its Dean, the senator other senators went to when a room needed wisdom, steadiness, and a conscience.

And what he built will outlive all of us. It was Ed Harbison who carried the legislation making Georgia a Purple Heart State, so that no veteran's sacrifice would pass unmarked. It was Ed Harbison who established a separate Veterans Court, so that men and women who had served would be met with understanding rather than indifference. It was Ed Harbison who founded the Georgia Military Veterans Hall of Fame, of which he is himself a proud member. He won a contracting preference for businesses owned by disabled veterans. He fought to see that veterans received fair academic credit for the training and sacrifice of their service. He chaired the Senate Committee on State Institutions and Property, served as Vice-Chairman of the Veterans, Military, and Homeland Security Committee, and led the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus. And before any of it, he served his community as a broadcast Journalist, as second vice-president of the Muscogee County School Board, and on the Columbus Charter Review Commission.

Mr. Speaker, if you want the true measure of Ed Harbison, do not look at the headlines. Look at the quiet bills--the ones that never made the evening news. In 2008 he sponsored a law to cut through the red tape that was punishing the children of military families, boys and girls uprooted from state to state through no fault of their own and made to start over again and again. Nobody was marching for those children. Ed Harbison simply saw them, and he wrote a law so that the moving would not cost them their education. He authored the legislation consolidating Chattahoochee County and Cusseta, strengthening the very ground his people stand on. And he fought for the emergency call boxes along Interstate 185 from LaGrange to Columbus--a small thing, Mr. Speaker, until it is your mother stranded on the shoulder of that highway after dark, and then it is the whole world.

That was always his instinct: the traveler in the dark, the soldier far from home, the child who needed one grown person in his corner. The people of Chattahoochee, Macon, Marion, Schley, Talbot, Taylor, and Muscogee Counties did not merely have a senator who represented them. They had a senator who belonged to them. Ed has said the rule he lived by came from his mother, who taught him to do unto others as he would have them do unto him. For thirty-four years he did exactly that-- quietly, faithfully, and without ever needing the credit.

Mr. Speaker, no honest account of this good man is complete without the love that carried him. Ed shared his life and his calling with his beloved late wife, Cecilia, who sustained him through every long session and every hard campaign, and who paid the private price that public service always exacts at home. Though she is no longer with us, I have no doubt she is present in every room where his name is called, and that she looks on him with pride. And anyone who knows Ed Harbison knows what his son, Edward, means to him. Above every title he has earned, every gavel he has held, and every honor he has received, Ed Harbison is a devoted father. The same tenderness he wrote into the law for a stranger's child, he has lived out every single day for his own. A man may give thirty-four years to his state, but the truest accounting of him is the love he gives his family--and by that reckoning, Ed Harbison is a wealthy man.

Mr. Speaker, there comes a moment in every life of service when a man must lay the work down and trust others to carry it forward. Ed Harbison has come to that moment, and he comes to it with his head high and his hands clean. He has called his years in the Senate the greatest honor of his life. Mr. Speaker, the honor was ours. It belonged to every family made stronger, every veteran finally seen, every neighbor who knew that somewhere under the Gold Dome there was a man who would do right by them when nobody was watching.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues in the United States House of Representatives to join my wife, Vivian, and me, along with the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's Second Congressional District, in honoring the extraordinary life and service of State Senator Ed Harbison. We thank Ed, for the wounds he carries and the country he served. We thank him for the seat he tended and the trust he kept. We thank him for thirty-four years of doing unto others. May God bless him, may God bless the State of Georgia, and may He grant his every good and peaceful day he has so richly earned. Well done, my friend. Well done.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a full heart to pay tribute to a friend of more than fifty years, and a man who has spent his entire life standing beside families on the hardest days they will ever know. On December 31, 2026, Councilor Bruce H. Huff, Sr., will conclude more than fifteen years of distinguished service as City Councilor for District 3 of the Columbus Consolidated Government. Columbus will be poorer for his leaving and richer for his having served.

Mr. Speaker, I did not meet Bruce Huff at a ribbon cutting. I knew the Huffs long before there was a councilman among them. I knew his father, Charles E. Huff, Sr., and his mother, Malinda H. Huff--people of quiet dignity who built something in Columbus that money cannot buy and politics cannot manufacture. I have watched this family for half a century--through funerals and weddings, through campaigns and crises. When you have known a family that long, you stop grading them on their best day; you know what they are like on their worst day. And I can tell this House that the Huffs of Columbus, Georgia, are the same people in the daylight that they are in the dark.

Bruce is the middle son, and the second-generation owner of International Funeral Home. Mr. Speaker, I want my colleagues to understand what that means in a Black community in the American South. The funeral director is not merely a businessman. He is the first to arrive when the worst thing has happened. He is the one who comes at two o'clock in the morning, who sits in the kitchen with a widow who does not yet know how she will pay for anything, who makes certain that a mother who had very little in this life is carried out of it with dignity. Bruce Huff has done that work for decades--not for applause, and often not for payment--because his father did it before him.

That work shaped everything else. Bruce graduated from Hardaway High School in 1975 as an honor student and three-sport letterman, then earned his degree from Florida State University in 1980, lettering four years in baseball. Then he came home. Sitting with grieving families, he saw a need no one else was meeting. So, he became a licensed insurance agent, founded Huff's Insurance Service in 1987, and in 1992 merged it with the family funeral home so that no family would be left choosing between a decent burial and next month's rent. In 1996 he earned his degree from Gupton-Jones College of Funeral Service. To this day he works side by side with his brother, Charles E. Huff, Jr., carrying forward what their parents began.

Mr. Speaker, a man who has spent his life burying his neighbors comes to public service with a different set of eyes. When Bruce Huff took his seat on that Council, he already knew District 3 by heart--every street, every corner, every family. For more than fifteen years he did the patient, unglamorous work of making his district a place where people could live well and not merely be laid to rest.

The list is extraordinary. The Fort Benning Gateway at I-185 and Victory Drive. The Brown Avenue Bridge. The Follow Me Trail. Streetscapes on Wynnton Road, on Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, and on Fort Benning Road. The I-185 interchanges at Custer Road and at Cusseta Road. The Buena Vista Road Spiderweb and Corridor improvements. A new Spencer High School. The Muscogee County School District Athletic Complex. Hundreds of millions of dollars--but Mr. Speaker, Bruce Huff never talked about the money. He talked about the child who could finally walk to school on a sidewalk, the grandmother whose street no longer flooded, the young man who could reach a job because the road finally went through.

And he gave himself away outside the Council chamber, too--at St. James AME Church, where he served on the Trustee Board; in Columbus State University's Teen Achievers Program; as president of Sally Little League, where he taught somebody else's boys how to hold a bat and how to lose with grace; in the Delta Iota Lambda Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated; and in Prince Hall Free and Accepted Masons, Electric City Lodge No 322. He was named Mortician of the Year by the Georgia Funeral Service Practitioner Association in 2009--though every honor I have handed him felt small next to what he had already given.

Mr. Speaker, none of it would have been possible without his family. Bruce is married to Charonda D. Huff, who has carried the weight of public life alongside him. They are the proud parents of two sons, Anthony and Bruce, Jr., and the doting grandparents of Denim. I want that grandson to know something one day, when he is old enough to read these words in the permanent record of the United States Congress: your granddaddy spent his life carrying other people's sorrow so they would not have to carry it alone.

Bruce, you have wiped away a great many tears in Columbus, Georgia. Allow an old friend to shed a few on your behalf. You have earned your rest. But knowing you, I do not expect you to take much of it.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join my wife, Vivian, and me, along with the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's Second Congressional District in honoring Councilor Bruce H.

Huff, Sr., for more than fifteen years of faithful service to District 3, and for a lifetime of quiet, sacred work on behalf of families in their darkest hours. May God bless him, his wife Charonda, their sons, their grandson, and the city that is better because Bruce Huff answered when he was called.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a heavy heart to honor the life, the service, and the enduring legacy of my predecessor and my friend, the Honorable Charles Floyd Hatcher, who passed from labor to reward on September 1, 2026, in Alexandria, Virginia, surrounded by the family he adored. He was 87 years old. A funeral service to celebrate his remarkable and purpose filled life will be held on Thursday, September 10, 2026, at the Camilla United Methodist Church in Camilla, Georgia.

Charles Hatcher was born on July 1, 1939, in Doerun, Georgia, to Clifford Edward ``C.E.'' Hatcher and Agnes Faircloth Hatcher. He was a son of the soil in the truest sense--raised among the peanut fields and dirt roads of Baker and Mitchell Counties, in a corner of Southwest Georgia where a man's word was his bond and a neighbor's trouble was your own. He carried that country's upbringing with him for the rest of his days. No matter how many decades passed or how many miles he traveled, Charles Hatcher always found his way back home.

He answered his country's call first, serving in the United States Air Force from 1958 to 1962. He then earned his bachelor's degree from Georgia Southern University and his law degree from the University of Georgia School of Law in 1969. He built a thriving law practice in Albany, but the courtroom could not contain a calling that large. He served the people of Georgia in the State House of Representatives from 1973 to 1980, and was then elected to this body, where he represented Georgia's Second Congressional District for six terms.

Mr. Speaker, in these halls Charles Hatcher was a champion of the farmer, the rural family, and the small-town South. He understood that the peanut growers and row-crop farmers of Southwest Georgia were not statistics in an agriculture bill--they were his people. When his service in this House concluded, he did not retire from the work. He continued it as a presidential appointee at the United States

Department of Agriculture during the Clinton administration, still fighting for the land and the people who work it.

I would be remiss, Mr. Speaker, if I did not speak plainly about something. In 1992, Charles Hatcher and I were opponents for this very seat. Elections in our part of Georgia are hard-fought, and ours was no exception. But when it was over, Charles Hatcher showed me--and showed our district--the kind of man he was. There was no bitterness in him. There was no small-mindedness in him. He handed me a district he loved and a people he had served faithfully, and he wished me well in doing it. In almost fifty years of public life, I have learned that you can measure a man's character by how he carries a loss. By that measure, Charles Hatcher was a giant.

The titles never defined him. What defined him was the way he made people feel. He never met a stranger. He had a gift--and I mean a genuine gift--for making a person feel welcomed, valued, and heard. Whether he was walking the marbled halls of this Capitol, sitting at a kitchen table or visiting with his neighbors at Marina Towers, Charles Hatcher built relationships and brought people together In retirement he enjoyed his golf, but he never stopped giving himself away. He delivered for Meals on Wheels. He gave his time to charitable causes. He was a faithful member of Washington Street United Methodist Church in Alexandria, Virginia.

Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey once said that the moral test of government is how it treats those in the dawn of life, the children; those in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped. Mr. Speaker, Charles Hatcher passed that test--not only as a legislator casting votes on this floor, but as a man carrying a hot meal up a walkway to somebody who had nobody else coming. That is what a public servant looks like when the cameras are gone and the title has expired.

The greatest beneficiaries of his love were the family he treasured. He is survived by his beloved wife, Krysta Harden; his sons, Chuck and his wife, Tracey, and Jon and his wife, Kris; his five grandchildren, Ansley, Chase, Boone, Tingen, and Walker; and his brother, Marcus Hatcher and his wife, Joy. He was preceded in death by his daughter, Polly Hatcher--a grief no father should have to carry, and one he bore with quiet grace--as well as his parents, C.E. and Agnes Hatcher, and his siblings, Clifford ``Bubba'' Hatcher, Irma Carr, Grace Adkins, and Glenn Hatcher.

Mr. Speaker, the peanut fields of this country will bloom again this year, and the men and women who work them will never know all that Charles Hatcher did on their behalf. That is the nature of faithful service--most of it goes unseen and unthanked. But it is written down somewhere, and it is written down here today.

Therefore, on behalf of my wife, Vivian, and me along with the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's Second Congressional District, I ask my colleagues to join me in honoring the extraordinary life of the Honorable Charles Floyd Hatcher, in extending our deepest sympathy to Krysta and to the entire Hatcher family, and in saying of this good and faithful servant: well done.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the life and legacy of Lieutenant Colonel Berry Henry Henderson, Jr., United States Army, Retired, of Columbus, Georgia, who passed peacefully on September 4, 2026, at the age of ninety-three--twenty-three days short of his ninety-fourth birthday.

Berry Henderson was born on September 27, 1932, in Athens, Georgia, and he came of age in a country that would ask a great deal of the young men of his generation. He earned his Bachelor of Business Administration from North Georgia College in 1953, and he answered that call by putting on the uniform of the United States Army--a uniform he would wear for the next twenty-two years.

He became an aviator. Over the course of his career he logged more than three thousand hours in the air as both an airplane and a helicopter pilot. And in 1965--the year this Nation began pouring its sons into Southeast Asia--Captain Henderson found himself in Vietnam, commanding a Chinook company.

Mr. Speaker, I want my colleagues to sit with what that means. The Chinook crews of 1965 flew into places nothing else could reach. They carried ammunition and artillery forward into positions that were already under fire, and they came back out carrying wounded men who had run out of every other option. Those pilots did not get to choose their weather, and they did not get to choose their landing zones. They went where they were told, and they went because somebody on the ground was waiting.

There are men alive in this country today--grandfathers now, great- grandfathers--who never learned Berry Henderson's name and never will. But they came home. Some of them came home because of the company he led and the standard he held them to. That is a debt that does not appear on any ledger, and it is the kind of debt this Nation has never found a way to repay.

He later served as an instructor for the Command and General Staff Officer Course, teaching the officers who would lead the Army after him. He retired in 1975 with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Mr. Speaker, he did something I find quietly beautiful. A man who had spent twenty-two years flying human beings through fire spent the rest of his life helping families find a place to come home to. In 1977 he joined three partners in organizing Showcase Realty. He became a real estate instructor. He served as president of his local board. He was named dean of the Georgia Real Estate Institute, and he rose to serve as president of the Georgia Association of REALTORS. He had carried men out of danger; now he handed families the keys to their front doors. In every organization he ever joined, he rose--not because he sought the title, but because people watching him decided he ought to have it.

He was also, by every account, a man who knew how to enjoy the life he had fought to protect. He and his beloved Marcella traveled the world together. He loved Cadillacs, and he loved horses--a helicopter pilot with a weakness for horsepower of every kind. Fifty-two years he had with her. When she went on ahead of him, he carried her with him for the rest of the way.

Mr. Speaker, there is one more thing I would ask this body to consider. Berry Henderson's son, B.H. ``Skip'' Henderson III, serves today as the 70th Mayor of the City of Columbus, Georgia. And in the biography that introduces the Mayor to the citizens he serves--the official page, the one on the city's own letterhead--there is a sentence that says simply that the Mayor is the son of Army veteran Berry Henderson.

A grown man, the chief executive of one of Georgia's great cities, and when he tells his city who he is, he begins with his daddy. That is not a line a public relations office writes. That is a son telling the truth about where he came from.

Lieutenant Colonel Henderson is survived by his son, Skip, and his wife Karon; his daughter, Susan Henderson; his granddaughter, Kyle Henderson, and Mike Karam; his grandson, Joe Henderson, and McKenna; his great-grandson, Burke Karam, his niece, Kathleen Hughes; and several great nieces and nephews. He was preceded in death by his wife of more than fifty-two years, Marcella; his parents, Berry and Jo Henderson; and his sister, Mary Ann Henderson.

After more than three thousand hours in the air, he has flown his last mission. He is cleared to land. And Marcella has been waiting a long time at the end of that runway.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues in the House of Representatives to join my wife, Vivian, and me, along with the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's Second Congressional District in honoring the life of Lieutenant Colonel Berry Henry Henderson, Jr., and in extending our deepest sympathy to Mayor Henderson and to the entire Henderson family.

Mr. Speaker, 2 days ago, Georgia lost a true public servant and leader. Former Congressman Charles Hatcher was born in Georgia, served our country in the United States Air Force, earned his law degree, and returned to Southwest Georgia to practice his profession.

He served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1973 to 1980 and subsequently in the U.S. House of Representatives, this House, from 1981 to 1992. He loved rural, Southwest Georgia. During his years of public service, he was a champion for agriculture and rural development.

While we competed in the 1992 Democratic primary for Georgia's Second Congressional District, which I won, I was glad to have his support and counsel, nonetheless, as I started my tenure on Capitol Hill. He and his wife, the Honorable Krysta Hardin, became friends of longstanding, and I will always cherish that friendship.

He continued to serve Americans as a Presidential appointee in the U.S. Department of Agriculture during both Clinton administrations, and he continued to serve the Virginia community in which he resided thereafter, volunteering his time with a number of local charities, including Meals on Wheels, and through his local church, the Washington Street United Methodist Church in Alexandria.

He leaves behind a legacy of love and compassion through his work and the relationships that he built.

I extend my heartfelt condolences to his wife, Krysta; his children; his grandchildren; and loving family; as well as all of those whose lives he touched and helped make better. I will miss him dearly.

Mr. Speaker, I now yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Austin Scott), my colleague and friend.

Mr. Speaker, I ask that the Members of this House and all persons in the Chamber rise for a moment

of silence in memory of the Honorable Charles Hatcher.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman from Georgia, the Honorable Everton Blair, Jr., be permitted to take the oath of office today.

His certificate of election has not arrived, but there is no contest and no question has been raised with regard to his election.

Mr. Speaker, as dean of the Georgia congressional delegation, I am pleased to welcome Dr. Everton Blair, Jr., as the newest member of our delegation, representing Georgia's 13th Congressional District.

Our delegation is diverse, consisting of ordinary citizens with an extraordinary passion for improving lives and representing the great State of Georgia. Most of all, regardless of our differences, we consistently and tirelessly pursue common ground, uplifting our communities and addressing their needs and interests.

Everton is 34 years old, born and raised in Gwinnett County in the metro Atlanta area. His parents are both Jamaican immigrants. His father is a computer scientist and his mother a pediatrician.

Everton earned a B.A. in mathematics from Harvard College; a master's in policy, organization, and leadership from Stanford University; and a doctorate of educational leadership from the Harvard Graduate School as a Presidential Public Service Fellow.

He taught for 2 years in the Atlanta public school system through the Teach America Program, and in 2018, at the young age of 26, he ran for a seat on the Gwinnett County Board of Education, defeating a longtime incumbent and becoming the youngest and first person of color to serve on the board. Moreover, he was unanimously selected to chair that board and led the Gwinnett system through the COVID-19 pandemic.

In April 2025, along with several others, he filed to run for a seat in the 120th Congress for the 13th Congressional District that was represented by our late colleague David Scott.

Sadly, David passed and Everton announced that he would run in the special election for the remainder of David Scott's unexpired term, which he won last month.

We welcome this dynamic, young leader to the Georgia delegation and to this House as he begins his service to the people of Georgia's 13th Congressional District for the remainder of this Congress.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Blair).

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a man who has spent half a century doing the hardest and holiest work there is--the Reverend Ronald G. Toney, who retires after fifty years in the gospel ministry, thirty-three of them as pastor of the historic Lizzie Chapel Baptist Church in Macon, Georgia. An event to celebrate his remarkable ministry was held on August 22, 2026, at the Tubman Museum in Macon, Georgia.

Mr. Speaker, when we mark a man's retirement in this Chamber, we usually recite a list. I want to do something different, because a list will not hold what this man has done.

Ronald Toney is a son of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Now, Mr. Speaker, I want the House to sit with that for a moment. For the better part of the last century, the road out of Georgia ran north. Our people packed what they could carry and rode toward Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee looking for wages and dignity that this State would not give them. That was the Great Migration, and it emptied a great deal of talent out of the South.

Ronald Toney ran that road in reverse.

He was born up North, where our people had gone for refuge, and he came back down here--to Georgia, to the Black Belt, to the small cities and the working neighborhoods--and he gave this State fifty years of his life. He came back to the place his generation was told to leave. That is not a career decision, Mr. Speaker. That is a calling.

He came by way of Morehouse College, where he graduated cum laude with a degree in religion. As a Morehouse man myself, I know that house does not hand out that Latin honor lightly. He went on to study at the Interdenominational Theological Center and at Columbia Theological Seminary, both in Atlanta. He believed--rightly--that a called man still owes God a trained mind.

His ministry began in Milwaukee in 1976 at Greater Galilee Baptist Church, and continued at Damascus Baptist Church, where he served as assistant pastor. He came to Georgia in 1981 as an associate minister at Antioch Baptist Church North in Atlanta. In 1985 he was called to his first pastorate, Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church in Thomson, Georgia. And in April of 1993, he was called to Lizzie Chapel Baptist Church in Macon, where he has stood ever since.

Mr. Speaker, thirty-three years in one pulpit is a rarer thing than this body may realize, and I want to say plainly what it costs and what it builds.

Thirty-three years means he baptized children who came back and asked him to marry them and then brought him their own babies to bless. It means he stood over the caskets of the mothers of that church--the women who fed him, corrected him, and prayed him through his first years--and he preached them home one by one. It means he sat in hospital rooms at two o'clock in the morning with families who had nobody else to call. It means there are men and women walking around Macon today who made it through the worst season of their lives because a preacher would not stop calling the house.

A pastor who stays that long stops being a hired man and becomes family. That is what Ronald Toney became to Lizzie Chapel.

And he never confined the ministry to the sanctuary. In McDuffie County he served as president of the Ministerial Association, president of the County Health Coalition, and president of the NAACP branch-- because he understood that a shepherd who will not fight for the flock outside the gate is no shepherd at all. In Bibb County he served on the board of Citizens Advocacy and on the Economic Opportunity Council. He gave his time to the General Missionary Baptist Convention of Georgia as an instructor in the Congress of Christian Education and later as president of the Tenth District Congress, and he served as Second Vice Moderator of the Union Baptist Missionary and Educational Association of Middle Georgia.

Mr. Speaker, two of his services tell me the most about the man. He sat on the board of the Crisis Line and Safe House, and on the board of the Family Counseling Center. Any pastor who has been at it long enough knows the truth those two boards represent: that some of the people singing in the choir on Sunday morning are going home to houses that are not safe. Ronald Toney did not merely pray about that. He got up and took a seat at the table where something could be done about it.

And he founded the Gifts of Grace Foundation--a name that tells you everything about how this man understood his own life. Not gifts he earned. Gifts of grace.

Mr. Speaker, none of this was done alone. For all of these years, Reverend Toney has been supported by his wife, Patricia, whose name appears on no program and in no minutes, but without whom none of this record exists. And it was done alongside their four children--Jason, Ronald D., LaTai, and Erika--who shared their father with a congregation for their entire lives, and who gave up Sunday dinners and family evenings and a father's undivided attention so that other people's families could be held together. The pastor's family pays a bill that nobody itemizes. Let this Chamber itemize it today.

Mr. Speaker, a man can retire from a pulpit. He cannot retire from what he has already built. The counseling he gave is still working. The children he baptized are still standing. The church he served is still open. Fifty years of that does not stop when a man steps down; it simply keeps walking around Middle Georgia in the shape of other people's lives.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, whom the world still calls the Prince of Preachers, once said of his own life's ambition:

``I know of nothing which I would choose to have as the

subject of my ambition for life than to be kept faithful to

my God till death, still to be a soul winner, still to be a

true herald of the cross, and testify the name of Jesus to

the last hour.''

Mr. Speaker, that was Spurgeon's ambition. By the grace of God, it has been Ronald Toney's record.

Therefore, Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join my wife Vivian and me along with the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's 2nd Congressional District in honoring the Reverend Ronald G. Toney for fifty years of faithful service in the gospel ministry, for thirty- three years of devoted pastoral leadership at Lizzie Chapel Baptist Church, and for a lifetime given to the people of Georgia and beyond. We wish him and Patricia every blessing in this new season, and we say to him what he has spent a lifetime helping other people become ready to hear:

Well done, thou good and faithful servant.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a son of Middle Georgia whose life's work has been to make certain that his neighbors were seen--Mr. Alex C. Habersham, founder and publisher of the Macon- Middle Georgia Black Pages, which this week marks thirty-five years at the Tubman Museum in Macon under the theme ``35 Years Strong: Honoring Our Past, Powering Our Future.''

Mr. Speaker, thirty-five years is a long time to keep a promise.

Alex Habersham was born and reared in Macon, in Tindall Heights-- built in the 1940s as the city's first public housing development for Black families. He graduated from Ballard-Hudson High School, went on to Savannah State University to train as a teacher, and then did what too few do: he came home. He came back and taught at the very high school that raised him.

But first, Mr. Speaker, we need to talk about the 1960's.

When Macon integrated its public schools, Alex Habersham was among the first Black educators transferred to Lanier High School. Think about what that asked of a young man. He walked into a building that had not been built with him in mind, in a city that had not yet made up its mind, and he stood before other people's children and taught them anyway. No cameras. No ceremony. Just a Black teacher with a lesson plan, doing the quiet, dangerous work of desegregation one class period at a time.

That is not on any plaque. But it belongs in this Record.

He built his teaching on a principle he still quotes today: you take a person from the known to the unknown. You start where they are. You do not shame them for where they are. You walk them somewhere better. That is how he taught. That is how he has lived.

Mr. Speaker, he was also an entrepreneur, and not a cautious one--a flower shop, a newspaper, a car wash, a transportation company, a radio and television repair shop, and in 1972, Habersham Records, a music store many in Macon still remember. So, he learned the hard lesson from the inside: you can serve your people well and still be invisible. Known on your street. Unknown in your city. A landmark to your neighbors and nowhere at all on paper.

So, in 1991, Alex Habersham did what his people have always done in this country when the record left them out. He started his own record.

He started it on Cotton Avenue--today D.T. Walton Sr. Way--the historic heart of Black commerce in Macon. He did not build the Black Pages beside that tradition. He built it inside of it.

Mr. Speaker, in 1912, a woman born Sarah Breedlove--the world came to know her as Madam C.J. Walker--rose uninvited at the National Negro Business League convention, because no one had thought to put her on the program. She told that room she had come up from the cotton fields to the washtub to the cook kitchen, and then, she said, she promoted herself into business. And she left them a sentence that has outlived every man who tried to ignore her:

``I got my start by giving myself a start.''

Mr. Speaker, that is the whole story of the Black Pages. Alex Habersham did not wait to be written into somebody else's book. He gave himself a start--and then spent thirty-five years handing that same start to everybody else.

There is a lineage here, and Mr. Habersham names it himself. A generation before, when a Black family could not be certain where they might safely stop for gasoline or a night's rest, a little green book told them where they would be welcome. That book helped our people survive. Alex Habersham published one that helped our people prosper. Both did the same holy work--they wrote down the names.

And what a record it has become. More than thirty editions. More than a thousand Black-owned businesses. Nine counties across Middle Georgia. Physicians and barbers, churches and bookstores, contractors and caterers--alongside scholarship notices and memorial tributes. A directory, Mr. Speaker, is never only a directory. It is a declaration. It says: this business is real. This family is here. This work is worthy of the ink.

Nor did his love for young people ever stay inside a classroom. He co-founded the Adopt-A-Role-Model Program, so a young man in Macon could sit across from a professional in his field and see with his own eyes that such a life was possible. He established Bird City Energetics. And for years he has instructed in the State Bar of Georgia's BASICS Program--a program with a recidivism rate of seven percent. Let that number sit for a moment. Behind it are men who came home and stayed home. Mothers who stopped waiting by the phone. Children who got their fathers back.

He has chaired the Macon-Bibb County Board of Tax Assessors, served the Greater Macon Chamber of Commerce, published the Macon Courier, and hosted Macon's Call to

Action. He has been honored by the NAACP, by our Secretary of State as an Outstanding Georgia Citizen, by the United States Small Business Administration as Minority Small Business Champion of the Year, and by his brothers of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, incorporated.

But the awards on the wall are rarely the real story. The real story is usually standing beside him. And so today I also honor his beloved wife, Mrs. Myrtle Habersham. Every deadline he met, she met with him. There is no honest accounting of these thirty-five years that does not have Myrtle's name in it.

Mr. Speaker, it is fitting--almost providential--that this celebration is held at the Tubman Museum, because that building exists for the same reason the Black Pages exists. Both are houses of memory, built by people who understood that if we do not write it down, they will say it never happened.

And there is one more thing this House should know. The 2026-2027 edition is the last one that will ever be printed. Beginning in 2027, The Black Pages is moving to a digital platform--an app, an online marketplace, a new way for a small business with no website of its own to be found. Mr. Habersham is not retreating. He is doing in 2026 exactly what he did in 1991: going where his people are.

But that means the volume in his hands this evening is the last of its kind.

One day, Mr. Speaker, a young woman in Macon is going to open that final printed edition. She will run her finger down a column of small print. And she will find it--her grandmother's shop. The address. The telephone number. Proof, in black ink, that her people were here, that they built something, that they mattered enough to be listed.

She will never meet the man who put that name on the page. But she will weep over it just the same.

That is what Alex Habersham has been doing for thirty-five years. Not selling advertising. Preserving evidence--evidence that in Macon, Georgia, Black enterprise was never a footnote. It was a foundation.

The Book of Proverbs tells us that a good man leaveth an inheritance to his children's children. Alex Habersham is leaving Middle Georgia an inheritance we can hold in our hands.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join my wife Vivian and me, along with the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's 2nd Congressional in congratulating Mr. Alex C. Habersham on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Macon-Middle Georgia Black Pages. I would also like for them to join us in thanking Mrs. Myrtle Habersham for her partnership and her sacrifice, and in wishing them both many more chapters yet to be written.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and may God bless the Habersham family, may God bless the city of Macon, and may God continue to bless these United States of America.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a heavy heart to honor a man who spent his whole life mending the hearts of others--Mr. Robert ``Bob'' Hutchinson, Sr., who was called home to glory on Wednesday, July 22, 2026, at the age of 77, in the city he loved and served for so long, Albany, Georgia. There are homes across Southwest Georgia tonight where the light seems a little dimmer, because a man who spent his life turning the lights on for children has finally laid down his own. A homegoing service to celebrate his remarkable life was held on Saturday, August 1, 2026, at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia.

Bob was born on July 19, 1949, in Ocala, Florida, to the late Clemm and Ethlene Blakely Hutchinson. He answered a calling early and never once stopped serving. After graduating from high school in 1967, he enlisted in the United States Army and gave to his country the same devotion he would later give to a generation of children who needed him more than they had words to say. For more than forty-five years, Bob made a quiet holy promise to every child who crossed his path--that no matter where they came from, no matter what they carried, they would have a safe place to belong, a mentor who believed in them, and a chance to become who God made them to be.

His life's work found its home in Albany, at the Cedar Avenue Boys and Girls Club and there it grew into a legacy that touched an entire region. Rising to Director of Operations and ultimately to Chief Professional Officer, Bob led the Boys and Girls Clubs of Albany and from three locations to eleven, until more than five thousand young people were being loved, fed, taught, and lifted every single day. He planted Club sites in schools, in churches, in housing communities-- anywhere a hurting child might be--because he could not bear the thought of one boy or one girl being too far from a hand that would reach for them. And in 1995, he flung the doors open to girls as well, because in Bob's heart there was not one child on this earth who did not deserve to be believed in.

The world gave Bob its honors, and they were many--Leadership Albany, the Law Day USA Liberty Bell Award, the Herman Prescott Award, the David Roark Light the Path Award, and in 2016, induction into the Georgia Boys and Girls Club Hall of Fame. He earned every one. But Mr. Speaker, I stand here to testify that Bob Hutchinson's name is written in a greater Hall of Fame than any this world can offer.

The eleventh chapter of Hebrews records what the saints have long called the Hall of Faith--God's own roll call of the faithful. By faith Abraham. By faith Moses. By faith Sarah. These are the men and women who, Scripture says, ``all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off.'' And of one of them the Word says something that could have been written for Bob Hutchinson himself: ``he being dead yet speaketh.'' Mr. Speaker, that is Bob. He is gone from us--but he is not silent. He still speaks. He speaks every time a child he mentored chooses hope over despair. He speaks every time a young man who had no father remembers the man who chose to father him anyway. He speaks in ten thousand lives, and he will go on speaking long after every one of us in this Chamber has been forgotten.

You do not measure a man like Bob by buildings or by plaques. You measure him by the frightened child who walked through a Club door with his head down and walked back out with his head up. You measure him by the boys and girls--now grown into teachers, ministers, business owners, mothers, and fathers--who still cannot speak his name without their voices breaking. Somewhere tonight there is a grown man who learned to tie his shoes, to shake a hand, to look another person in the eye, because Bob Hutchinson took the time. That man will carry Bob with him to his own grave, and hand him to his children after that. This is the true Hall of Fame--the one written not in bronze, but in the living hearts of the people he refused to give up on.

Through all of it, beside this remarkable man stood the love of his life, his devoted wife of fifty-five years, Lula Peterson Hutchinson. Fifty-five years. Through every trial and every triumph, she never let go of his hand. Together they raised three children--Rodney, Michelle, and Robert, Jr.--and were blessed with four grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. And among the countless he fathered was his devoted protege, Marvin Laster, who loved him not as a supervisor but as a daddy. When a man's employees weep for him like sons, they have learned everything they will ever need to know about how he lived.

Mr. Speaker, the Scripture says we are surrounded by ``so great a cloud of witnesses.'' Bob Hutchinson has taken his place in that number now. And so, on behalf of Georgia's 2nd Congressional District, I ask my colleagues to join my wife Vivian and me, along with the more than 765,00 people of Georgia's 2nd Congressional District in mourning his loss and celebrating his life. To Lula, to his children, grandchildren, and to the countless sons and daughters of Southwest Georgia who called him family--we grieve with them, and we thank God for the gift of him. Rest now, Bob. Well done, good and faithful servant. He has fought a good fight, he has finished his course, he has kept the faith--and generations yet unborn will rise up and call him blessed.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the life, the artistry, and the abiding legacy of Osceola Marie Macarthy Adams, a daughter of Albany, Georgia, and to recognize the dedication of a Georgia historical marker placed in her honor in Albany, Georgia on August 1, 2026, through the devoted labor of the Albany Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated.

Mr. Speaker, she was born on June 13, 1890, in Albany, Georgia, to Charles Hannibal Macarthy and Julia Ann Johnson Macarthy. She was raised at the corner of South Jackson Street and West Highland Avenue, in the neighborhood our people have always called the Harlem District of Albany. Her father was a life insurance executive who believed that a child's mind was the only inheritance a Black family in South Georgia could not be dispossessed of, and he raised his daughter accordingly.

She was schooled here at home, at Albany Normal School, the institution that would grow into Albany State University. She went on to the preparatory school at Fisk University, and then to Howard University, where she studied ancient Greek and philosophy and took her place in the Class of 1913.

Mr. Speaker, 1913 was no ordinary year in the life of this woman, and it was no ordinary year in the life of this Nation. On January 13, 1913, on the campus of Howard University, Osceola Macarthy and twenty- one other young women founded Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated--an organization that today numbers more than a thousand chapters on four continents and has poured more than a century of scholarship, service, and public witness into the life of this Republic. And barely seven weeks later, on March 3, 1913, she and her sisters took their place in the Woman Suffrage Procession down Pennsylvania Avenue, on the eve of a Presidential inauguration, in a city that would have preferred they march at the rear or not at all. That march was the first public act of the sorority she helped to found. It was also, Mr. Speaker, the act of a twenty-two-year-old Black woman from Albany, Georgia, demanding a ballot that her own hometown would not honestly hand her for another fifty-two years.

She married Dr. Numa P. G. Adams, who would become the first African- American dean of the Howard University College of Medicine. She taught at Bennett College. And then she went north to New York and became, under the stage name Osceola Archer, one of the first Black actresses to appear on a Broadway stage, in the 1934 production of ``Between Two Worlds.''

But her greatest work, Mr. Speaker, was not the applause she received. It was the applause she made possible for others. As director of the Studio Theatre School at the American Negro Theatre, she trained a generation that would change the face of the American stage and screen--among them Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, and Ruby Dee. She directed some three dozen productions at the Putnam County Playhouse and is believed to have been the first African-American director in American summer stock. She directed ``The Glass Menagerie.'' She directed ``A Streetcar Named Desire.'' She directed ``The Diary of Anne Frank.'' In 1978, her sorority created ``The Osceola,'' an award bearing her name and given for distinguished achievement in the arts, and the AUDELCO awards recognized her as an outstanding pioneer. She died on November 11, 1983, at ninety-three years of age.

Mr. Speaker, permit me a personal word. There is something almost unbearably tender about the geography of this woman's life.

She was born in the Harlem District of Albany, Georgia--and she made her name in Harlem, New York. She carried the name of her neighborhood a thousand miles and gave it back to the world as art.

She never got to see this day. She never got to see her name in iron on a Georgia roadside. When she was a girl on South Jackson Street, there was no marker in Albany with a Black woman's name on it, and no reason for a child to imagine there ever would be. When the Albany Movement filled the jails of my hometown in 1961 and 1962, she was seventy-one years old and far away, watching her city on the evening news, and no one thought to put her name on anything. She died with the marker unmade. But her sorors did not forget. The daughters of Delta remembered what Georgia had not yet recorded. And so a marker now stands where the house once stood.

Mr. Speaker, I want this Chamber to see what I see. I see a little girl in Albany, Georgia--maybe eight years old, maybe nine--walking past that corner on a Saturday morning with her grandmother's hand in hers. She stops. She sounds out the letters. And she learns, on the very ground where she is standing, that a Black girl from her city, from her neighborhood, from her streets, once helped found a sisterhood that circled the globe, once marched for a vote she could not cast, once stood on a Broadway stage where no one like her had stood, and once taught Sidney Poitier how to say a line.

That little girl will walk away from that marker taller than she came. And that, Mr. Speaker, is what a marker is for. We do not set these stones for the dead. The dead are past our praise. We set them for the living, and for the ones not yet born, so that no child of Albany ever again has to be told what she can become--she can go read it for herself, on the corner of South Jackson and West Highland.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join my wife Vivian and me along the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's 2nd Congressional District in honoring the memory of Osceola Marie Macarthy Adams; in commending the Albany Alumnae Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated, and all who labored to see this marker raised; and in celebrating a daughter of Georgia's 2nd Congressional District whose life reminds us that greatness has a birthplace, and that it is our solemn and joyful duty to mark it.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a woman whose life has spanned a century of American history, and who has spent nearly every year of it giving something away--knowledge, kindness, service, and love. Today, July 21, 2026, Mrs. Lovye Williamson Cochran of Albany, Georgia, celebrates her 100th birthday.

She was born on July 21, 1926, in Reidsville, North Carolina, the firstborn daughter of Weldon and Hessie Williamson, and the eldest of four girls. She was raised in a home where education was not a luxury but an inheritance, and she took that inheritance seriously. She graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Reidsville, then went on to Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina--that historic institution which has been turning out Bennett Belles of uncommon dignity and backbone for generations. She later earned her master's degree from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, also in Greensboro. In an era when this Nation placed obstacle after obstacle in the path of a young Black woman seeking to be educated, Lovye Williamson simply kept walking.

In 1950, she married Mr. Benjamin Franklin Cochran, Jr., and together they made their life in Albany, Georgia. Mr. Cochran became Albany's first Black professional photographer. Mr. Speaker, I want my colleagues to understand what that meant. In those years, a Black family's wedding, a Black child's graduation, a Black church's anniversary, a Black mother's Sunday best--these were not events the wider world considered worth preserving. Benjamin Cochran preserved them anyway. He spent his life making sure that our community could see itself, and see itself beautiful. And while he was capturing the faces, his wife was in the classroom shaping the very children whose portraits he took. He kept the pictures. She helped make the people in them.

Mrs. Cochran is a retired educator, and in Southwest Georgia that title carries a particular weight. There are grown men and women in Albany today--parents, deacons, business owners, public servants--who first learned to believe in themselves in her classroom. A teacher's monument is not made of stone. It walks around, and it talks back, and it raises its own children the way she taught it to.

She and Mr. Cochran raised three children--Beverly, Juanita, and Benjamin, III--and she is the proud grandmother of Anthony. For decades she has lived on Lily Pond Road in Albany, which the older residents still remember as Westbrook Road. Mrs. Cochran is the longest surviving resident of that street. She has watched the road change its name, watched the houses change hands, watched the city change around her-- and through all of it, she never changed who she was.

Her service did not end at the schoolhouse door. Mrs. Cochran has given her time and her judgment to the community's institutions, serving on the Board of Directors of the Boys and Girls Clubs and with the Albany ARC, known today as the Arc of Southwest Georgia. Mr. Speaker, those two commitments say something about the shape of her heart. She gave herself to children who needed somewhere safe to go after the last bell, and she gave herself to citizens with developmental disabilities--neighbors whom too much of the world has been content to overlook. She never overlooked anybody.

Mrs. Cochran is a devoted member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated, and remains active in the sorority at 100 years of age. She holds the honored designation of Delta Dear.

Mr. Speaker, among Mrs. Cochran's sorors in Delta Sigma Theta was the late Honorable Shirley Chisholm of New York, the first Black woman elected to this body and the first to seek the presidential nomination of a major party. Congresswoman Chisholm gave us a definition of a life well spent that has never been improved upon: ``Service is the rent that you pay for the space that you occupy here on this earth.'' By that measure, Mr. Speaker, Lovye Williamson Cochran does not owe this world one thin dime. She paid her rent in full--in classrooms and in church pews, in board rooms and in her sorority and on her street, in the raising of three children and in a hundred years of quiet, faithful, unglamorous good. She paid it early, she paid it often, and she is paying it still.

This evening, more than 200 Deltas of the Albany community are gathering at the Galleria on Dawson Road to celebrate her. They have made only one request of those who come: bring flowers. Not gifts. Flowers--in her own words, so that she can smell them, while she is living.

Mr. Speaker, there is a whole sermon in that sentence. Too often in this country we save our finest words for funerals. We wait until a woman can no longer hear us to say what she has meant to us. We send the roses to the graveside when we could have set them on the kitchen table. Mrs. Lovye Cochran, at 100 years old, has taught this community one final lesson, and it may be the most important one she has ever given: love people out loud, and do it while they are here to enjoy it.

So tonight the flowers will come. And she will hold them, and she will smell them, and she will know--beyond any possibility of doubt-- exactly how much she is loved.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join my wife Vivian and me, on behalf of the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's 2nd Congressional District, in extending our warmest congratulations to Mrs. Lovye Williamson Cochran on the occasion of her 100th birthday. We thank her for a century of faith, family, teaching, and service. We salute her children, her grandson, her sorors, and her neighbors. We pray God's continued blessing upon her in the years yet to come.