[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 25 (Thursday, February 25, 2010)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E251-E252]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         IN HONOR OF AGNES TEBO

                                 ______
                                 

                             HON. SAM FARR

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, February 25, 2010

  Mr. FARR. Madam Speaker, I rise today to honor a great American, Mrs. 
Agnes Tebo for a lifetime of public service and civil rights activism. 
This coming Saturday, the Monterey County Branch of the NAACP will 
honor Mrs. Tebo with its President's award. I will have the great 
pleasure of attending this ceremony and in conveying to her the 
gratitude and best wishes of the House. I am particularly excited 
because I have been privileged for many years to count myself among her 
friends. Indeed, she has been a great role model and inspiration to 
several generations of public servants from Monterey County. And that 
remains true today; at 95 Agnes Tebo is truly one of our nation's great 
treasures.
  Born October 25, 1914, in Port Arthur, Texas, Agnes Dronet grew up in 
a world dominated by Jim Crow's pervasive injustice. As a child, she 
remembers learning to live with the separate schools, restaurants, and 
other humiliations that so dominated the daily lives of Port Arthur's 
African American citizens. More ominously, Agnes can remember the 
climate of fear created by the Klu Klux Klan through murders, cross 
burnings, and other terrorist acts. She recently told a reporter that 
``we had to walk a straight line or we knew we'd end up dead. The 
people who did it would brag about it, and nobody would do anything 
about it. The law wasn't enforced. As a child, I just accepted it. I 
just thought that's how life was.'' But that did not mean that Agnes 
thought it was right. In 1937, at the age of 23, Agnes found her way to 
Salinas, California, after a childhood spent working to help her single 
mother

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support their family. She soon found work as a housekeeper for one of 
the City's founding families. Several years later years later, she 
married Louis ``Bonnie'' Tebo, a former classmate from Port Arthur who 
had also relocated to Salinas. They were married for more than 50 years 
when he died.
  While less obvious than in the South of their childhood, racism still 
found Agnes and Bonnie in Salinas. For example, African Americans found 
it next to impossible to buy property. Realtors simply refused to show, 
and sellers to sell, property to African American buyers. Agnes had 
been a member of the NAACP since her teenage years in Port Arthur. She 
drew on that experience in 1939 to co-found a Salinas branch. With so 
few African Americans living in Salinas, they had to recruit white 
friends to join in order to meet the fifty member threshold for a new 
chapter. The new branch took on the property issue and made steady 
progress. With Agnes often leading the way over the years, they took on 
many other challenges facing people of color in the Salinas valley. In 
2006, Agnes helped smooth the way for the Salinas and Monterey 
Peninsula branches to merge together into the Monterey County Branch.
  Despite her humble origins, Agnes has managed to travel the world and 
devote countless hours to aiding the needy. In 1981, for example, she 
and Bonnie helped purchase and distribute food, clothing and medicine 
to 1,200 people in Haiti. She works as a liaison for the NAACP's Jan 
Wright Scholarship, and she continues to support The Agnes and Bonne 
Tebo Scholarship at Hartnell College.
  Madam Speaker, I know that I speak for the whole House in extending 
to Agnes Tebo our deep gratitude for her work to improve the lives of 
her neighbors, both in Salinas and around the world.

                          ____________________