[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 104 (Monday, June 22, 2026)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E593]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]





         HONORING THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF MR. BENJAMIN A. HOLDEN

                                 ______
                                 

                      HON. SANFORD D. BISHOP, JR.

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, June 22, 2026

  Mr. BISHOP. Mr. Speaker, I rise today with a heavy heart, and on 
behalf of a grieving community, to honor a man whose life enriched my 
district, my state, and indeed this entire Nation--Mr. Benjamin A. 
Holden--who departed this life on June 10, 2026. at the age of 
sixtythree. On Saturday, June 20th. his beloved famijy, his Columbus 
community, and friends from across this country gathered at the Fourth 
Street Missionary Baptist Church in Columbus, Georgia, to celebrate his 
remarkable life and lay him to rest.
  Mr. Speaker, Ben Holden believed, with his whole heart, in the power 
of two things--stories, and people. And across sixty-three years, he 
gave his life to both.
  His own story began far from Georgia, in St. Louis, Missouri, where 
he was born on June 3, 1963, to Lorine and Percy Holden. He found his 
calling early. At just seventeen years old, he was already a cub 
reporter in the sports department of the St. Louis Post Dispatch, 
covering high school athletics--and his gift was so evident that it 
earned him a scholarship from the Pulitzer family to attend the 
University of Missouri. It was there, in 1983, that he became a proud 
member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, joining the ranks of the Divine 
Nine that so many of us hold dear. He went on to the University of 
California at Berkeley, earning both his law degree and his M.B.A., and 
meeting the love of his life, Melanie.
  And then Ben Holden became one of the finest journalists of his 
generation. As a Los Angeles-based reporter for The Wall Street 
Journal, he chronicled the most consequential stories of his time--the 
painful aftermath of the Rodney King trial, the O.J. Simpson case that 
gripped the entire nation, and more. His front-page Journal piece 
dissecting the staggering economics of the Simpson spectacle--which he 
wittily titled ``O.J. G.D.P.''--earned him a national journalism award. 
He was a truth-teller, Mr. Speaker, and he told the truth with style.
  But Ben understood that journalism is more than a profession--it is a 
pillar of freedom itself. A licensed attorney in both California and 
Georgia, he gave himself to the cause of a free press and an 
accountable judiciary. As director of the Donald W. Reynolds National 
Center for the Courts and Media, he carried the First Amendment far 
beyond our borders. On behalf of our own State Department and the 
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, he traveled to 
Kosovo--a young nation still struggling to trust its own institutions--
and there he trained its judges, its prosecutors, and its journalists 
in the principles of liberty, because he believed a free press and an 
honest court were essential to that fragile republic's democratic 
future. And right here at home, from 2004 to 2010, he led the newsroom 
of our own Columbus Ledger-Enquirer through one of the most turbulent 
eras journalism has ever known.
  He gave the next generation his wisdom, too, on the faculties of the 
University of Illinois and Northwestern University's storied Medill 
School of Journalism, where he taught young people that the press is 
the only profession the Constitution itself protects by name. And he 
fought for his students as if they were his own children.
  But Mr. Speaker, of all the chapters in Ben Holden's remarkable 
story, the one he loved the most was written right here in Columbus, 
Georgia. Nelson Mandela taught the world that ``education is the most 
powerful weapon which you can use to change the world''--and Ben Holden 
took up that weapon on behalf of children too often overlooked. In 
2009, he founded a nonprofit he called Columbus Scholars. He carried a 
simple and stubborn conviction--that the only thing standing between a 
bright child who makes it and a bright child who does not is somebody 
willing to support them. And he did not merely say it. He spent more 
than forty years of his life proving it. Partnering with Big Brothers 
Big Sisters of the Chattahoochee Valley, Columbus Scholars pairs 
economically disadvantaged young people with mentors and with 
scholarships--and in just seventeen years, it has raised more than one 
million dollars and lifted more than one hundred students toward a 
future they could not have reached on their own.
  Think of that, Mr. Speaker. A man who had reported on the most 
powerful people in America, a man who had trained judges across an 
ocean, found his deepest joy in a Columbus child with ability and empty 
pockets--and in becoming the very support that child needed. He helped 
those young people write brand-new stories for their lives.
  And there is one last story I must share. The celebrated poet and 
author Maya Angelou once wrote that ``there is no greater agony than 
bearing an untold story inside you.'' Mr. Speaker, Benjamin Holden 
refused to carry his story to the grave. In his final days, he 
completed the draft of a novel he called Spirit of St. Louis--the tale 
of two first generation Black men coming of age in America, navigating 
race and class and the long odds of making it as an outsider. In so 
many ways, it was his own story. He did not live to see it published. 
But his family has vowed to finish what he began and bring his words 
into the world--and so this storyteller, who gave his life to telling 
the stories of others, will at last have his own story told.
  For that is who Ben Holden was. A devoted husband to Melanie, his 
wife of thirty-one years. A loving father to his daughter, Joy. A 
brother, an uncle, and the very heart of a family that gathered for 
reunions they lovingly called ``Fling Dings.'' He was a man who never 
missed a birthday, a wedding, or a ballgame--a faithful Atlanta Hawks 
seasonticket holder who lived and died by his Missouri Tigers and his 
Northwestern Wildcats.
  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 life and legacy of Benjamin A. Holden. We give thanks for a life 
lived with conviction, with generosity, and with an unshakable faith in 
the power of stories and of people to make this world better. On behalf 
of Georgia's Second Congressional District, I extend my deepest 
sympathy to his wife, Melanie; to his daughter, Joy; to his entire 
family; and to the countless students and colleagues whose lives he 
forever changed. Their loss is immeasurable. But the truth he defended, 
the students he lifted, and the love he gave will go on speaking long 
after his pen has been laid down.
  Well done to Ben, and I wish him eternal rest. We will help tell the 
rest of his story.

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