[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 144 (Monday, September 14, 2026)]
[House]
[Pages H5538-H5539]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1230
                        HONORING MICHAEL FIGURES

  (Mr. Figures of Alabama was recognized to address the House for 5 
minutes.)
  Mr. FIGURES. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize the anniversary 
of the most defining day of my life to date, September 13, 1996, a fall 
afternoon.
  My mother walked into a waiting room at the University of South 
Alabama's medical center and announced to a collection of friends, 
family, and colleagues that my father, Michael Figures, had died. He 
had suffered a brain aneurysm at the house at the dinner table a couple 
of nights before and ultimately passed away.
  Mr. Speaker, my father was a lot of things to a lot of people. He was 
a State senator. He was a civil rights advocate. He was a lawyer and a 
community leader. To me, he was just Daddy.
  By any assessment, he exceeded expectations of a Black kid born in 
1947 in Mobile, Alabama, in a neighborhood called The Bottle.
  He went on to excel academically, went to Stillman College in 
Tuscaloosa, and was one of a handful of students who were selected to 
integrate the University of Alabama Law School, and he did that.
  Mr. Speaker, 3 years later, he walked out as the first African 
American to graduate from the University of Alabama Law School.
  He didn't stop there. He got elected to the State senate. Because of 
the Voting Rights Act, he was one of the first three African Americans 
to walk into that chamber since Reconstruction.
  He used that position, as well as being a lawyer, to continue to 
advocate for rights and to continue to advocate for equality and 
fairness in communities. You can imagine that Alabama,

[[Page H5539]]

at that time, had not experienced them.
  He didn't stop there. In 1981, the Ku Klux Klan lynched a young man 
in Mobile, Alabama, named Michael Donald. My father ultimately brought 
the lawsuit that resulted in the bankruptcy of the Ku Klux Klan.
  I remember that when my father passed away, the condolences started 
pouring in. President Clinton called the house, and then-Secretary of 
Labor Alexis Herman called the house, and then Jesse Jackson.
  Then, there was one who surprised me: George Wallace--that George 
Wallace, who, just a few years before my father had integrated 
University of Alabama Law School, had stood in the schoolhouse doors, 
famously, to block enrollment of African Americans coming into the 
school. Later on, their lives would cross paths. As Governor Wallace 
was winding down his terms as Governor, my father was in the State 
senate.
  As a kid, though I did not fully comprehend or understand the 
magnitude of my father's impact or who he was or what he was and what 
he meant to so many people, I knew one thing: that the respect that I 
saw shown to him as a kid, whether it was at a park ballfield, in the 
aisles at Home Depot, or at a gas station, I knew I wanted to be like 
that when I grew up.
  This is in an era where Gatorade commercials were plastered around at 
the time telling kids that ``I want to be like Mike,'' but the Mike I 
wanted to be like was not a basketball player. He wore a suit to work, 
and he was my father.
  Those footsteps that he left, I would later walk in them. I followed 
those same footsteps to the University of Alabama, where I got my law 
degree. I followed those same footsteps to the career that I had at the 
Department of Justice in seeking to make government work for everybody. 
I followed those footsteps here to Congress because my father, though 
he never served in Congress, was a State senator. He was the first 
Black president of the Alabama State Senate.
  He was the named plaintiff, believe it or not, in the Voting Rights 
Act case that created the first opportunity district for an African 
American to represent Alabama since Reconstruction, a seat that is now 
occupied by Congresswoman Terri Sewell. He literally paved the pathway 
for me to be here some 30 years after his death.
  Mr. Speaker, I can stand here today with just a simple message to my 
father, and that is: I am here because of him. That 10-year-old boy, or 
barely 11-year-old boy back in September of 1996, became a man, and not 
just any man. He became a Congressman who can stand on this floor in 
this House and deliver this speech because of what he and because of 
what my mother did for me.
  As I sit here today, it is only my dream and my hope that one day, my 
children, the children who I have of my own--I have four now of my own 
just like my father--that one day they can also look to me with the 
same admiration, with the same twinkle in their eyes that I did with my 
father and say, ``I want to be like my daddy,'' and that based on the 
work that we have done in our lives, that that pathway is made easier 
and possible for them.

                          ____________________