[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 134 (Thursday, August 20, 2026)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E799-E800]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HONORING MR. ALEX C. HABERSHAM AND THE 35TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MACON-
MIDDLE GEORGIA BLACK PAGES
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HON. SANFORD D. BISHOP, JR.
of georgia
in the house of representatives
Thursday, August 20, 2026
Mr. BISHOP. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a son of Middle
Georgia whose life's work has been to make certain that his neighbors
were seen--Mr. Alex C. Habersham, founder and publisher of the Macon-
Middle Georgia Black Pages, which this week marks thirty-five years at
the Tubman Museum in Macon under the theme ``35 Years Strong: Honoring
Our Past, Powering Our Future.''
Mr. Speaker, thirty-five years is a long time to keep a promise.
Alex Habersham was born and reared in Macon, in Tindall Heights--
built in the 1940s as the city's first public housing development for
Black families. He graduated from Ballard-Hudson High School, went on
to Savannah State University to train as a teacher, and then did what
too few do: he came home. He came back and taught at the very high
school that raised him.
But first, Mr. Speaker, we need to talk about the 1960's.
When Macon integrated its public schools, Alex Habersham was among
the first Black educators transferred to Lanier High School. Think
about what that asked of a young man. He walked into a building that
had not been built with him in mind, in a city that had not yet made up
its mind, and he stood before other people's children and taught them
anyway. No cameras. No ceremony. Just a Black teacher with a lesson
plan, doing the quiet, dangerous work of desegregation one class period
at a time.
That is not on any plaque. But it belongs in this Record.
He built his teaching on a principle he still quotes today: you take
a person from the known to the unknown. You start where they are. You
do not shame them for where they are. You walk them somewhere better.
That is how he taught. That is how he has lived.
Mr. Speaker, he was also an entrepreneur, and not a cautious one--a
flower shop, a newspaper, a car wash, a transportation company, a radio
and television repair shop, and in 1972, Habersham Records, a music
store many in Macon still remember. So, he learned the hard lesson from
the inside: you can serve your people well and still be invisible.
Known on your street. Unknown in your city. A landmark to your
neighbors and nowhere at all on paper.
So, in 1991, Alex Habersham did what his people have always done in
this country when the record left them out. He started his own record.
He started it on Cotton Avenue--today D.T. Walton Sr. Way--the
historic heart of Black commerce in Macon. He did not build the Black
Pages beside that tradition. He built it inside of it.
Mr. Speaker, in 1912, a woman born Sarah Breedlove--the world came to
know her as Madam C.J. Walker--rose uninvited at the National Negro
Business League convention, because no one had thought to put her on
the program. She told that room she had come up from the cotton fields
to the washtub to the cook kitchen, and then, she said, she promoted
herself into business. And she left them a sentence that has outlived
every man who tried to ignore her:
``I got my start by giving myself a start.''
Mr. Speaker, that is the whole story of the Black Pages. Alex
Habersham did not wait to be written into somebody else's book. He gave
himself a start--and then spent thirty-five years handing that same
start to everybody else.
There is a lineage here, and Mr. Habersham names it himself. A
generation before, when a Black family could not be certain where they
might safely stop for gasoline or a night's rest, a little green book
told them where they would be welcome. That book helped our people
survive. Alex Habersham published one that helped our people prosper.
Both did the same holy work--they wrote down the names.
And what a record it has become. More than thirty editions. More than
a thousand Black-owned businesses. Nine counties across Middle Georgia.
Physicians and barbers, churches and bookstores, contractors and
caterers--alongside scholarship notices and memorial tributes. A
directory, Mr. Speaker, is never only a directory. It is a declaration.
It says: this business is real. This family is here. This work is
worthy of the ink.
Nor did his love for young people ever stay inside a classroom. He
co-founded the Adopt-A-Role-Model Program, so a young man in Macon
could sit across from a professional in his field and see with his own
eyes that such a life was possible. He established Bird City
Energetics. And for years he has instructed in the State Bar of
Georgia's BASICS Program--a program with a recidivism rate of seven
percent. Let that number sit for a moment. Behind it are men who came
home and stayed home. Mothers who stopped waiting by the phone.
Children who got their fathers back.
He has chaired the Macon-Bibb County Board of Tax Assessors, served
the Greater Macon Chamber of Commerce, published the Macon Courier, and
hosted Macon's Call to
[[Page E800]]
Action. He has been honored by the NAACP, by our Secretary of State as
an Outstanding Georgia Citizen, by the United States Small Business
Administration as Minority Small Business Champion of the Year, and by
his brothers of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, incorporated.
But the awards on the wall are rarely the real story. The real story
is usually standing beside him. And so today I also honor his beloved
wife, Mrs. Myrtle Habersham. Every deadline he met, she met with him.
There is no honest accounting of these thirty-five years that does not
have Myrtle's name in it.
Mr. Speaker, it is fitting--almost providential--that this
celebration is held at the Tubman Museum, because that building exists
for the same reason the Black Pages exists. Both are houses of memory,
built by people who understood that if we do not write it down, they
will say it never happened.
And there is one more thing this House should know. The 2026-2027
edition is the last one that will ever be printed. Beginning in 2027,
The Black Pages is moving to a digital platform--an app, an online
marketplace, a new way for a small business with no website of its own
to be found. Mr. Habersham is not retreating. He is doing in 2026
exactly what he did in 1991: going where his people are.
But that means the volume in his hands this evening is the last of
its kind.
One day, Mr. Speaker, a young woman in Macon is going to open that
final printed edition. She will run her finger down a column of small
print. And she will find it--her grandmother's shop. The address. The
telephone number. Proof, in black ink, that her people were here, that
they built something, that they mattered enough to be listed.
She will never meet the man who put that name on the page. But she
will weep over it just the same.
That is what Alex Habersham has been doing for thirty-five years. Not
selling advertising. Preserving evidence--evidence that in Macon,
Georgia, Black enterprise was never a footnote. It was a foundation.
The Book of Proverbs tells us that a good man leaveth an inheritance
to his children's children. Alex Habersham is leaving Middle Georgia an
inheritance we can hold in our hands.
Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join my wife Vivian and me, along
with the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's 2nd Congressional in
congratulating Mr. Alex C. Habersham on the thirty-fifth anniversary of
the Macon-Middle Georgia Black Pages. I would also like for them to
join us in thanking Mrs. Myrtle Habersham for her partnership and her
sacrifice, and in wishing them both many more chapters yet to be
written.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and may God bless the Habersham family, may
God bless the city of Macon, and may God continue to bless these United
States of America.
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