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Congressional Daily Record
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Issued
July 21, 2026
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Download official Extensions PDFReturn to issue contextHONORING MRS. LOVYE WILLIAMSON COCHRAN ON THE OCCASION OF HER 100TH
BIRTHDAY
HON. SANFORD D. BISHOP, JR.
of georgia
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, July 21, 2026
Mr. BISHOP. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a woman whose life has spanned a century of American history, and who has spent nearly every year of it giving something away—knowledge, kindness, service, and love. Today, July 21, 2026, Mrs. Lovye Williamson Cochran of Albany, Georgia, celebrates her 100th birthday.
firstborn daughter of Weldon and Hessie Williamson, and the eldest of four girls. She was raised in a home where education was not a luxury but an inheritance, and she took that inheritance seriously. She graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Reidsville, then went on to Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina—that historic institution which has been turning out Bennett Belles of uncommon dignity and backbone for generations. She later earned her master's degree from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, also in Greensboro. In an era when this Nation placed obstacle after obstacle in the path of a young Black woman seeking to be educated, Lovye Williamson simply kept walking.
In 1950, she married Mr. Benjamin Franklin Cochran, Jr., and together they made their life in Albany, Georgia. Mr. Cochran became Albany's first Black professional photographer. Mr. Speaker, I want my colleagues to understand what that meant. In those years, a Black family's wedding, a Black child's graduation, a Black church's anniversary, a Black mother's Sunday best—these were not events the wider world considered worth preserving. Benjamin Cochran preserved them anyway. He spent his life making sure that our community could see itself, and see itself beautiful. And while he was capturing the faces, his wife was in the classroom shaping the very children whose portraits he took. He kept the pictures. She helped make the people in them.
Mrs. Cochran is a retired educator, and in Southwest Georgia that title carries a particular weight. There are grown men and women in Albany today—parents, deacons, business owners, public servants—who first learned to believe in themselves in her classroom. A teacher's monument is not made of stone. It walks around, and it talks back, and it raises its own children the way she taught it to.
She and Mr. Cochran raised three children—Beverly, Juanita, and Benjamin, III—and she is the proud grandmother of Anthony. For decades she has lived on Lily Pond Road in Albany, which the older residents still remember as Westbrook Road. Mrs. Cochran is the longest surviving resident of that street. She has watched the road change its name, watched the houses change hands, watched the city change around her— and through all of it, she never changed who she was.
Her service did not end at the schoolhouse door. Mrs. Cochran has given her time and her judgment to the community's institutions, serving on the Board of Directors of the Boys and Girls Clubs and with the Albany ARC, known today as the Arc of Southwest Georgia. Mr. Speaker, those two commitments say something about the shape of her heart. She gave herself to children who needed somewhere safe to go after the last bell, and she gave herself to citizens with developmental disabilities—neighbors whom too much of the world has been content to overlook. She never overlooked anybody.
Mrs. Cochran is a devoted member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated, and remains active in the sorority at 100 years of age. She holds the honored designation of Delta Dear.
Mr. Speaker, among Mrs. Cochran's sorors in Delta Sigma Theta was the late Honorable Shirley Chisholm of New York, the first Black woman elected to this body and the first to seek the presidential nomination of a major party. Congresswoman Chisholm gave us a definition of a life well spent that has never been improved upon: “Service is the rent that you pay for the space that you occupy here on this earth.” By that measure, Mr. Speaker, Lovye Williamson Cochran does not owe this world one thin dime. She paid her rent in full—in classrooms and in church pews, in board rooms and in her sorority and on her street, in the raising of three children and in a hundred years of quiet, faithful, unglamorous good. She paid it early, she paid it often, and she is paying it still.
gathering at the Galleria on Dawson Road to celebrate her. They have made only one request of those who come: bring flowers. Not gifts. Flowers—in her own words, so that she can smell them, while she is living.
Mr. Speaker, there is a whole sermon in that sentence. Too often in this country we save our finest words for funerals. We wait until a woman can no longer hear us to say what she has meant to us. We send the roses to the graveside when we could have set them on the kitchen table. Mrs. Lovye Cochran, at 100 years old, has taught this community one final lesson, and it may be the most important one she has ever given: love people out loud, and do it while they are here to enjoy it.
So tonight the flowers will come. And she will hold them, and she will smell them, and she will know—beyond any possibility of doubt— exactly how much she is loved.
Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join my wife Vivian and me, on behalf of the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's 2nd Congressional District, in extending our warmest congratulations to Mrs. Lovye Williamson Cochran on the occasion of her 100th birthday. We thank her for a century of faith, family, teaching, and service. We salute her children, her grandson, her sorors, and her neighbors. We pray God's continued blessing upon her in the years yet to come.