HONORING OSCEOLA MACARTHY ADAMS AND THE DEDICATION OF HER HISTORICAL MARKER IN ALBANY, GEORGIA

On 2026-08-03, Representative Sanford D. Bishop, Jr. (D-GA-2) delivered a floor speech titled "HONORING OSCEOLA MACARTHY ADAMS AND THE DEDICATION OF HER HISTORICAL MARKER IN ALBANY, GEORGIA" in the House.

HONORING OSCEOLA MACARTHY ADAMS AND THE DEDICATION OF HER HISTORICAL MARKER IN ALBANY, GEORGIA

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 126 (Monday, August 3, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 126 (Monday, August 3, 2026)] [Extensions of Remarks] [Page E769] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] HONORING OSCEOLA MACARTHY ADAMS AND THE DEDICATION OF HER HISTORICAL MARKER IN ALBANY, GEORGIA ______ HON. SANFORD D. BISHOP, JR. of georgia in the house of representatives Monday, August 3, 2026 Mr. BISHOP. 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. ____________________