[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 2]
[Senate]
[Pages 2362-2363]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          BLACK HISTORY MONTH

  Mr. CASEY. Mr. President, I rise today, as I have every year since I 
came to the Senate, in commemoration of Black History Month, to 
recognize an individual who has made a considerable contribution to 
society and the African-American community.
  Today, we honor the Reverend Dr. W. Wilson Goode, Sr., a trailblazing 
figure whose public service and private works have touched lives in 
Pennsylvania and around the country. Dr. Goode was born to tenant 
farmers in North Carolina, rose to become the first African-American 
mayor of Philadelphia, and now runs a nationally renowned organization 
called Amachi that mentors children whose parents have been 
incarcerated. Wilson Goode's story is a story of faith and perseverance 
and also provides an appropriate backdrop this Black History Month to 
talk about some of the barriers standing in the way of young people in 
this country today.
  Dr. Goode has dedicated his life after leaving elected public office 
to Amachi because, in his words, in these communities, ``the children 
were invisible.'' This ethos--a commitment to serving those whom the 
Bible calls ``the least of these''--has guided Dr. Goode's life and 
career since long before he helped organize Amachi. Empowering young 
people to achieve their potential is personal for Dr. Goode, who had to 
overcome a series of roadblocks himself growing up in the Jim Crow 
South.
  Dr. Goode went to segregated lower schools in Northampton County, NC, 
and Greensville County, VA, before moving to Philadelphia at the age of 
16. He arrived in Philadelphia on the first Monday in January in 1954. 
That same Monday 30 years later, this sharecroppers' son, who grew up 
drinking from separate fountains and eating at separate counters, was 
sworn in as the first African-American mayor of Philadelphia. In the 
intervening years, Dr. Goode's career proved a testament to all that 
can go right when young people are allowed a fair chance to succeed 
based purely, as a great man once said, on the ``content of their 
character.''
  Dr. Goode graduated from John Bartram High School in Philadelphia in 
1957 and went on to earn a bachelor's degree from Morgan State 
University, a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and 
a doctorate of ministry from Palmer Theological Seminary. He also 
served as an officer in the U.S. Army for 2 years.
  Along the way, Wilson Goode helped found the Black Political Forum, a 
Philadelphia-based group that brought together a coalition of Black 
community and business leaders to elect African Americans to public 
office. The forum transformed the political landscape in the city and 
Dr. Goode's career along with it.
  Dr. Goode was later chosen as Pennsylvania's first Black member of 
the Public Utilities Commission. In less than 6 months, he rose to 
become the first Black chairman of the PUC and soon thereafter was 
recruited to become the managing director of the city of Philadelphia 
under Mayor Bill Green in 1980. When Mayor Green did not seek 
reelection in 1983, Wilson Goode ran, won the election, and was sworn 
in as the first African-American mayor of Philadelphia on January 2, 
1984, exactly 30 years after he first set foot in the city.
  During his two terms in office, Dr. Goode accomplished a great deal. 
He worked to transform the city's skyline, helping businesses to grow 
and create jobs. He helped to level the playing field for minorities to 
work in city government and minority-run businesses to win government 
contracts. He created the Mayor's Commission on Literacy, which has now 
helped over 550,000 Philadelphians get the skills they need to live 
productive lives. He created the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network, 
PAGN, and the Mural Arts Program, two pioneering programs to make 
Philadelphia a nicer place to live and work.
  And he always looked to help those who needed it most, whether 
through his consistent advocacy for AIDS support programming or through 
his tireless efforts to reduce the number of homeless people living on 
the streets. The latter goal still animates him today--he is the 
chairman and CEO of Self, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to serving 
homeless men and women.
  Dr. Goode left the mayor's office after two terms in 1992, but his 
commitment to public service remained. He went on to work as a Deputy 
Assistant Secretary of Education in the Clinton Administration. There, 
he devoted himself to the task of improving our education system for 7 
years until a unique opportunity presented itself. John J. DiIulio, 
Jr., President Bush's first director of the White House Office of 
Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, invited Dr. Goode to lead a 
mentoring organization that would later be called Amachi.
  Amachi's model, which is based on DiIulio's research, is quite 
simple: identify neighborhoods disproportionately impacted by 
incarceration and seek out children living in those neighborhoods to 
mentor. Amachi matches one mentor and one child for at least 1 hour, at 
least once a week, for at least 1 year. The goals are equally simple: 
it is a success if, after a year, the kids improve their school 
attendance, their grades, their behavior, and their relationships with 
the adults in their lives.
  Part of the reason for Amachi's success is its simplicity. It makes 
sense. The real power of the Amachi philosophy comes from its inherent 
recognition of how much young people can achieve with a consistently 
positive and loving mentoring presence in their lives. And young people 
growing up in communities impacted by over-incarceration, the invisible 
children that Dr. Goode takes the time to see, stand to benefit most.
  Amachi now receives Federal, State, and private funding, but it has 
modest roots. To find the first mentors, Dr. Goode walked around 
throughout Philadelphia, neighborhood by neighborhood, to community 
churches where he would recite neighborhood statistics on incarceration 
to local pastors. The terrible reality was that one in nine Black 
children has a parent in prison, compared to 1 in 57 white children--
one in nine. People of faith were interested in mentoring because two 
out of three families with an incarcerated member are unable to meet 
their basic needs and since 50 percent of the over 2.5 million children 
with an incarcerated parent in this country are age 9 or younger.
  These numbers motivated Wilson Goode to recruit his mentors and to 
travel to prisons seeking parents whose kids he could help. This is 
what he means when he says he is ``on a rescue mission.'' Standing in 
front of these

[[Page 2363]]

prisoners, his message was simple: ``I am here on behalf of your 
children.''
  And they believed him. He recruited 500 children his first year. 
Maybe they believed him in part because he could relate to these 
challenges--his own father was sent to prison when he was a teenager. 
His mother worked hard to make ends meet while Wilson Goode sought 
refuge in his church and in God. He found it, and now he works to 
provide the same refuge to young people in need.
  Doctor Goode's story perfectly embodies the idea of Amachi. Amachi is 
a West African word that means: ``who knows but what God has brought us 
through this child.'' Who knew that Dr. Goode, who grew up without 
electricity, who saw his father imprisoned in his adolescence, who 
gazed up at the leadership in his city and saw no one who looked like 
him, would be elected mayor of one of America's largest cities. ``Who 
knows but what God has brought us through this child.'' I have often 
said that every child is born with a light inside them, and it is our 
obligation to make sure that that light burns as brightly as the full 
measure of his or her potential. Dr. Goode's work with Amachi is a 
testament to this idea.
  But as we commemorate Black History Month, we must acknowledge that 
reality is unkind to this worthy aspiration for all our children: in 
this country, nearly half of Black men are arrested by the time they 
hit their mid-20s, and Black men are six times more likely to be 
incarcerated than White men, a worse disparity than in the 1960s. This 
means that the bright shining light of potential for an African-
American child is too often extinguished by the darkness of a jail 
cell.
  Looking at the system can be abstract and overwhelming--it is hard to 
see a child's potential from 30,000 feet. So Dr. Goode works on the 
ground--because he knows we have to break this cycle. Today Amachi-
modeled programs have helped over 300,000 children in more than 250 
cities nationwide. Maybe this is what Dr. King meant when he talked 
about ``dangerous unselfishness.'' Dr. Goode is up against an abstract 
and overwhelming system, but wields from the goodness of his heart the 
power to disrupt the status quo.
  Dr. Goode has faith that, in the months and years to come, we will 
see our criminal justice system reshaped to be fairer and more 
effective in targeting the people who pose the most danger to society. 
He has faith that we will make progress in helping those released from 
prison more easily reintegrate into their communities. But as he often 
says, ``no entry is the best reentry plan.'' So his work continues.
  Every day Amachi-trained mentors work to help thousands of children 
overcome the wide variety of challenges related to having a parent in 
prison or living in an area with a high rate of incarceration. In 
addition to the common financial struggles, these kids need help 
navigating the relationship changes that often take place when a loved 
one is sent to or returns from prison; or channeling powerful and 
confusing emotions into constructive activities; or overcoming the 
stigma that comes with having an incarcerated parent. What began as a 
local partnership between faith-based organizations has expanded to 
include volunteer mentors from a variety of sources on a national 
scale.
  All of this can be traced to Dr. Goode's deeply held belief that God 
has a very special interest in how we treat our children and that 
helping the children who need it most is God's work. His conviction has 
earned him great acclaim, whether through receiving the Civic Ventures 
Purpose Prize, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Citizen of the Year Award, 
or being honored by the White House as a Champion of Change.
  But I imagine the biggest reward for Dr. Goode is knowing he has 
created something lasting that will benefit generations to come. There 
are more than 81,000 children with a parent in prison in Pennsylvania. 
How many future doctors, lawyers or CEOs, preachers, teachers or 
Presidents may be among these children? They have infinite potential, 
and with God in his heart, the Reverend Dr. W. Wilson Goode, Sr., has 
stood alongside them.
  On the Senate floor today, we express our profound gratitude for his 
service on behalf of the children of Philadelphia, our Commonwealth and 
our country.
  Thank you.

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