[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.

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