On the recordNovember 3, 2021
I rise today to offer a tribute to one of my best friends and my political hero, my father-in-law, Linwood Holton, who died last Thursday at age 98. I wanted to talk about Linwood and his influence on my life, but there is no more appropriate time to talk about him than right now, as we are about to cast a vote to proceed to the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Abner Linwood Holton, Jr., was born September 21, 1923, in Big Stone Gap, VA. Big Stone Gap is a tiny town in the far southwest corner of Virginia, a few miles from the Virginia-Kentucky border. He was the son of a dad who helped run a small railroad--the Interstate Railroad--that would bring coal out of the coalfields to connect with a larger rail line that ran north and south through the Great Valley of Virginia. Growing up at that time, with three siblings, with parents who cared deeply about him, he saw the challenges of the Depression. And my father-in-law was a very remarkable youngster because he had a deep empathy for other people that sometimes young folks don't always have. My father-in-law wrote an autobiography called ``Opportunity Time'' in the early 2000s, and he described an experience in his life that was pivotal to the rest of his life. He was young, 8 or 9 years old. He lived in a community that was predominantly White folks. There were few African Americans in his town. It was a community that was connected to coal mines in Appalachia.…
