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Floor Speech
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Mr. CASEY. Madam President, I am honored to rise today on the last couple of days of Black History Month to talk about a program we have had since 2007 in our office. This is a time for us to reflect, in our State, upon the Black Pennsylvanians who have led our communities in years past and who continue to honor us with the trailblazing work that they do throughout their communities.
This year, I again have the privilege of honoring several Pennsylvanians as part of my Senate office's Black History Month celebration. Our honorees this year are Edgar and Barbara Farmer, who reside in State College, PA; Loretta Claiborne of York, PA; Donta Green of Pittsburgh, PA; and Lurline Jones of Philadelphia, PA.
The theme of this year's celebration is ``The Voices Empowering Generational Change.'' I think all of us would agree that change comes with great difficulty, and we know that when we honor these individuals, we honor Pennsylvanians, year after year, who have demonstrated the courage that has enabled others to follow them and to continue their work for change. It is especially important this year that we honor those with the courage to take that first difficult step to create change.
This Black History Month, I am grateful for the opportunity to pay tribute to several trailblazing Pennsylvanians who sparked change and, by doing that, make it possible for later generations to pursue that same powerful change. So I will just give a brief biographical sketch of each of our honorees for the Senate to hear about.
Loretta Claiborne, as I mentioned, is from York, PA. Loretta is a lifelong resident of York. She is a speaker, an athlete, and, above all, an advocate for people with disabilities. She was born in the middle of seven children to a low-income, single-parent family. She was partially blind and with an intellectual disability at her birth. She was unable to speak or run until she was 4 years old. But--you know what--since that age, she hasn't stopped running, having completed 26 marathons--that is 26 more than I have completed--twice placing her in the top 100 women in the Boston Marathon. She has won dozens of medals at the Special Olympics World Summer Games. She introduced President Clinton at the 1995 Special Olympics Summer Games. Loretta has been inducted into the Women in Sports Hall of Fame and the Special Olympics Pennsylvania Hall of Fame.
Loretta is a lifelong learner, communicating in four languages, including American Sign Language, and has received honorary doctoral degrees from Villanova University, Quinnipiac University, and York College--two of those three institutions in Pennsylvania.
More than a learner, Loretta is also a teacher, having given a TED talk on intellectual disabilities and speaking frequently about her story, including twice on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
She tells her story not to promote herself but to teach others that people with disabilities are equal to others. Here is something she said:
I figured if my story could change a person's mind about another person, or especially a child's mind about another child, then it was the right thing to do.
Loretta's story is all the more remarkable given that she was born at a time when a person with a disability was likely to be placed in an institution. Due to her efforts and others like her, people with disabilities today go to school, they go to work, and they are members of sports teams around the world.
Loretta is a trailblazer for disability civil rights, working to ensure that people with disabilities can grow, live, and continue to contribute to their communities as full members, sharing their own extraordinary gifts.
Our second honoree is Donta Green, from Pittsburgh. He is a mentor, coach, and widely respected community leader in Pittsburgh who brings excellence to all that he does. He is among the next generation of community leaders helping young men to reach for the future and working to empower others to take the first steps toward a better life.
As a coach for the Westinghouse Bulldogs, Donta took over a struggling football program and built it into a winner, even taking the Bulldogs to the State title game in both 2022 and 2023. As a coach, he is not just the architect of a football program but a molder and teacher of young men, helping them not only achieve on the field but also to translate their success off the field as well.
Donta also serves as the executive director of the Trade Institute of Pittsburgh--known by the acronym T-I-P, or TIP--which seeks to empower men and women with significant barriers to employment by providing them skills training and opportunities for career advancement. The Training Institute of Pittsburgh offers tuition-free trade programs such as masonry and carpentry, as well as related life skills such as financial and math literacy, resume and interview coaching, driver's license prep, and one-on-one life coaching.
Many of the students at TIP are formerly incarcerated individuals trying to make the difficult transition to life after prison. TIP does remarkable work helping them to overcome the societal biases and barriers that many of these Americans face. So many of these individuals are successful, achieving an employment rate of 94 percent among individuals who complete the program.
TIP also runs a workforce housing program that matches homeless students with a Training Institute of Pittsburgh alum who will work one-on-one with them until their lives and income are ready for independent living.
Our third honoree is Lurline Jones. Lurline is yet another coach or involved in athletics, as several of our honorees are. Lurline is from Philadelphia, as I mentioned. She is a teacher, a mentor, and a basketball coach with more than five decades of coaching experience within the school district of Philadelphia, where she recently retired as the head basketball coach of the Martin Luther King High School. Since her coaching career began, more than 300 of Lurline's student athletes have gone on to college on athletic scholarships, and 3 have played in the WNBA.
Lurline also cofounded the Developmental Basketball League, a nonprofit that helps girls and boys hone their fundamental basketball skills, and she has been doing this for nearly 50 years.
As impressive as her coaching career has been, Lurline is the first to tell you that it is not just about sports. ``These kids are my kids,'' she says. ``They know I'm teaching them more than how to play basketball.''
Lurline credits her mother, Mary Nixon, a domestic worker who grew up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, for instilling in her the spirit of an activist. Her mother raised Lurline in the Brewerytown section of North Philadelphia.
After leaving home for Morgan State College in Baltimore, which is now known as Morgan State University, Lurline Jones experienced legal segregation for the first time, spurring her to get involved in the civil rights movement, which landed her and hundreds of other Morgan students at that time in jail after protesting the segregation policy at a nearby movie theater.
Lurline was involved in fighting against gender disparities in athletics as well. As a high school player at Philadelphia's William Penn High School for Girls, she was denied a chance to play varsity basketball because the school did not field a team, spurring her to become a lifelong advocate for the rights of women athletes.
At the age of 80, Lurline's energy and enthusiasm are as strong as ever. Here is what she says:
I want to give these kids a chance to succeed in life. I feel extremely blessed to still have the opportunity to make an impact and pay it forward.
Finally, Madam President, our fourth and fifth honorees are Edgar and Barbara Farmer, as I mentioned, from State College, PA, the home of Penn State. Edgar and Barbara are longtime educators and community pillars in the State College community. They fought for years for progress on issues such as education and diversity.
Barbara Farmer is a retired educator who taught business classes in North Carolina and Virginia before serving as the first Black principal in the State College Area School District. After 40 years as an educator, Barbara became director of multicultural affairs at the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology. She also found time to volunteer and to serve her community outside of work, serving on the boards of Centre County United Way and the Women's Resource Center, while also chairing the State College Borough's Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Plaza Committee.
Edgar is a retired U.S. Army veteran who served in Vietnam, attended Penn State in the mid-1970s, and worked in higher education in North Carolina for almost two decades. In 1996, he returned to Penn State as a professor of workforce education and development.
Prior to retirement, Edgar Farmer worked in a number of roles, including head of Learning and Performance Systems and professor-in- charge of the Workforce Education and Development Program.
Barbara and Edgar Farmer have long shared their wisdom and expertise outside the classroom, coauthoring the two books: the first, ``Diversity in America: Visions of the Future,'' and the second, ``Leading with Character.''
They are leading contributors to local news outlets on the issues of education and diversity. In 2017, they served on Penn State's Policing People of Color Task Force and have long been involved in diversity issues in the Borough of State College.
Barbara and Edgar are also committed philanthropists, establishing and contributing to a number of funds and scholarships at Penn State, as well as Hampton University and Norfolk State University, where Barbara and Edgar received their undergraduate degrees.
Last November, as honorees of Penn State's annual Renaissance Fund celebration, Barbara and Edgar helped to raise nearly $200,000 for scholarships for students with financial needs. Regarding that event, Barbara summed up their approach to service, saying:
All we have done and all we hope to continue doing is part of the charge that we have been given as our life's task. Supporting one another and taking care of one another make the world and our community a better place.
No one could say it better than Barbara did.
So, once again, it is a privilege to be able to honor these remarkable Pennsylvanians and to speak briefly about their accomplishments here on the Senate floor.
Loretta Claiborne, Donta Green, Lurline Jones, and Edgar and Barbara Farmer are each, in their own right, individually and collectively, truly inspirational figures and leaders who have brought about remarkable change through their own efforts through their courage but who will continue to empower generational change, inspiring others to also fight for the change that we need across our commonwealth and our country.
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