Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I rise in tribute to our former colleague, Congressman Major Owens of Brooklyn, New York. Major and I were elected in the class of 1998 and had the joy of serving together for several decades. He was a fighter for learning and perhaps the first librarian ever elected to the Congress of the United States. He came from Brooklyn, far from where I lived, but his predecessor, Shirley Chisholm, was the only Member of Congress that in our first campaign came to campaign for me. I shall never forget that. Major was a social critic, and he was a voice from a Brooklyn that I only imagined as a child with the Brooklyn Dodgers. With the old Ebbets Field torn down, the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, and baseball changed forever from a human institution where the players came from that region to an enterprise where they were traded like chattel. Major understood the difference, and the work that he did here, whether it was fighting for learning, fighting for libraries, fighting for jobs in America, for the training of workers, he handled in a very measured way. He had a poetic sense about him when he came to the floor many times in the evening and delivered some of his handwritten lines. Through his work both in Brooklyn and for our country, he helped to build a better America, and he left us a better place for his service. I wish to extend to his family and to his former constituents the deep sympathy of the people of Ohio.…”