[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 106 (Thursday, June 17, 2021)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E661]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             RECOGNITION OF MS. ALTHEA MARGARET DAILY MILLS

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. DARREN SOTO

                               of florida

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, June 17, 2021

  Mr. SOTO. Madam Speaker, Ms. Althea Margaret Daily Mills is an unsung 
hero in the fight for desegregation in Florida. Ms. Mills began her 
education in Pughsville, Winter Haven's first Black community. When she 
was 13, she moved to Pennsylvania to live with her aunt. There, she was 
able to attend integrated schools. In 1963, Mills filed a lawsuit 
against the Polk County Board of Public Instruction to end the ``dual 
school system'' and allow her son to attend the then, all-white, Winter 
Haven High School. This lawsuit eventually led to the integration of 
all Polk County public schools. When asked about her motivation to 
challenge the system, Mills would later say ``Our instructors were just 
as good, but some of my son's textbooks would go to page 3 and then 
skip to page 35. You can't learn like that.''
  Ms. Mills also was the first black career employee of the United 
States Postal Service in Winter Haven and eventually became manager of 
the Florence Villa Post Office. But as the first Black postal worker, 
her career was not easy. At one point, Ms. Mills was transferred to 
another post office, in an area known to be unwelcoming to Black 
people, in an effort to get her to quit. While the move was 
intimidating, she once recalled that her worst day was when a Black 
patron refused to buy stamps from her because she was Black.
  Although Ms. Mills passed away in 2008, her legacy lives on. C.A. 
Boswell, Jr., the longtime attorney for the Polk County School Board, 
said of his former opponent, ``She was a good lady and had the best 
interests of the kids at heart, it was a different time. It took some 
brave people to hold that thing (the lawsuit) up.''
  The recognition of Ms. Althea Margaret Daily Mills is all the more 
special as we do it on June 17, 2021, on the first recognition of 
Juneteenth as a National Holiday. This Juneteenth is the 155th 
anniversary of the oldest nationally celebrated commemoration of the 
ending of slavery in the United States.
  General Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas 
which announced the freedom of the last American slaves.


                          General Order No. 3

       The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a 
     proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all 
     slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of 
     personal rights and rights of property, between former 
     masters and slaves and the connection heretofore existing 
     between them, becomes that between employer and hired labor. 
     The Freedmen are advised to remain at their present homes and 
     work for wages . . .

  By the reading of this order two-hundred and fifty thousand slaves 
were freed nearly two and a half years after Abraham Lincoln's 
Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.
  We thank Ms. Althea Margaret Daily Mills on this special day and 
appreciate her efforts to make our community a better place.

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