[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 13]
[House]
[Page 17746]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1040
                       IN MEMORY OF MAVIS DONAHUE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Illinois (Mr. Davis) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DAVIS of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, Members of the House, I rise 
first of all to commend a matriarch in my community who passed away a 
few days ago, Ms. Mavis Donahue, who came to the United States of 
America from Jamaica. Of course, much of her family came with her, and 
they kind of stay together as a group.
  It was her daughter, Claudette, that I first met, and we worked 
together for about 40 years. But then her son-in-law, Billy, 
Claudette's husband, took the first photograph that I ever used in a 
campaign brochure. Their daughter Erica, who is my goddaughter, was the 
first person who ever appeared on a campaign brochure when I decided to 
run for public office. So I simply want to commend them as they prepare 
to take their mother, their grandmother, their aunt, their friend, 
their neighbor, back to her home in Jamaica to be buried alongside her 
mother.
  I also join my colleagues in coming to pay tribute to our leader, the 
Reverend Congressman Emanuel Cleaver. We've all talked about his 
leadership, and I've been told two things about leadership that I 
always try to remember. One is that leadership is the ability to get 
other people to do what you want them to do but because they want to do 
it, meaning that somehow or another you can convince them that what 
you're talking about is the thing to do. The other thing that I've 
learned about leadership is that you can't lead successfully where you 
don't go, and you can't teach what you don't know.
  I've been able to follow the life of Emanuel Cleaver long before he 
became a Member of the House of Representatives. See, he grew up in the 
Midwest, kind of, but really the Southwest, in a real sense, as I did. 
Our schools played football in the Southwest Athletic Conference. The 
first time we decided to televise our game, we went out and washed cars 
and did all the things you did to raise the money that we needed. We 
played Prairie View, and lo and behold, they beat us 28-0, which was a 
real letdown after we had paid to have the football game televised.
  But I remember that Emanuel came out of school, went to work for the 
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, became a leader in his 
community as a young person, pastor of a tremendous church that I've 
had the opportunity to visit, and they even let me have something to 
say.
  Reverend Cleaver, Congressman Cleaver, America has benefited from 
your leadership for many years. We know that what you've done for the 
caucus and for this Congress will stand, but we know that you will keep 
doing it for many more years to come.
  God bless you and God keep you.

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