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August 20, 2026
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Download official Extensions PDFReturn to issue contextHONORING MR. ALEX C. HABERSHAM AND THE 35TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE MACON-
MIDDLE GEORGIA BLACK PAGES
HON. SANFORD D. BISHOP, JR.
of georgia
in the house of representatives
Thursday, August 20, 2026
Mr. BISHOP. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor a son of Middle Georgia whose life's work has been to make certain that his neighbors were seen—Mr. Alex C. Habersham, founder and publisher of the Macon- Middle Georgia Black Pages, which this week marks thirty-five years at the Tubman Museum in Macon under the theme “35 Years Strong: Honoring Our Past, Powering Our Future.”
Mr. Speaker, thirty-five years is a long time to keep a promise.
built in the 1940s as the city's first public housing development for Black families. He graduated from Ballard-Hudson High School, went on to Savannah State University to train as a teacher, and then did what too few do: he came home. He came back and taught at the very high school that raised him.
But first, Mr. Speaker, we need to talk about the 1960's.
the first Black educators transferred to Lanier High School. Think about what that asked of a young man. He walked into a building that had not been built with him in mind, in a city that had not yet made up its mind, and he stood before other people's children and taught them anyway. No cameras. No ceremony. Just a Black teacher with a lesson plan, doing the quiet, dangerous work of desegregation one class period at a time.
That is not on any plaque. But it belongs in this Record.
He built his teaching on a principle he still quotes today: you take a person from the known to the unknown. You start where they are. You do not shame them for where they are. You walk them somewhere better. That is how he taught. That is how he has lived.
Mr. Speaker, he was also an entrepreneur, and not a cautious one—a flower shop, a newspaper, a car wash, a transportation company, a radio and television repair shop, and in 1972, Habersham Records, a music store many in Macon still remember. So, he learned the hard lesson from the inside: you can serve your people well and still be invisible. Known on your street. Unknown in your city. A landmark to your neighbors and nowhere at all on paper.
He started it on Cotton Avenue—today D.T. Walton Sr. Way—the historic heart of Black commerce in Macon. He did not build the Black Pages beside that tradition. He built it inside of it.
Mr. Speaker, in 1912, a woman born Sarah Breedlove—the world came to know her as Madam C.J. Walker—rose uninvited at the National Negro Business League convention, because no one had thought to put her on the program. She told that room she had come up from the cotton fields to the washtub to the cook kitchen, and then, she said, she promoted herself into business. And she left them a sentence that has outlived every man who tried to ignore her:
“I got my start by giving myself a start.”
Mr. Speaker, that is the whole story of the Black Pages. Alex Habersham did not wait to be written into somebody else's book. He gave himself a start—and then spent thirty-five years handing that same start to everybody else.
There is a lineage here, and Mr. Habersham names it himself. A generation before, when a Black family could not be certain where they might safely stop for gasoline or a night's rest, a little green book told them where they would be welcome. That book helped our people survive. Alex Habersham published one that helped our people prosper. Both did the same holy work—they wrote down the names.
And what a record it has become. More than thirty editions. More than a thousand Black-owned businesses. Nine counties across Middle Georgia. Physicians and barbers, churches and bookstores, contractors and caterers—alongside scholarship notices and memorial tributes. A directory, Mr. Speaker, is never only a directory. It is a declaration. It says: this business is real. This family is here. This work is worthy of the ink.
Nor did his love for young people ever stay inside a classroom. He co-founded the Adopt-A-Role-Model Program, so a young man in Macon could sit across from a professional in his field and see with his own eyes that such a life was possible. He established Bird City Energetics. And for years he has instructed in the State Bar of Georgia's BASICS Program—a program with a recidivism rate of seven percent. Let that number sit for a moment. Behind it are men who came home and stayed home. Mothers who stopped waiting by the phone. Children who got their fathers back.
the Greater Macon Chamber of Commerce, published the Macon Courier, and hosted Macon's Call to
Action. He has been honored by the NAACP, by our Secretary of State as an Outstanding Georgia Citizen, by the United States Small Business Administration as Minority Small Business Champion of the Year, and by his brothers of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, incorporated.
But the awards on the wall are rarely the real story. The real story is usually standing beside him. And so today I also honor his beloved wife, Mrs. Myrtle Habersham. Every deadline he met, she met with him. There is no honest accounting of these thirty-five years that does not have Myrtle's name in it.
Mr. Speaker, it is fitting—almost providential—that this celebration is held at the Tubman Museum, because that building exists for the same reason the Black Pages exists. Both are houses of memory, built by people who understood that if we do not write it down, they will say it never happened.
And there is one more thing this House should know. The 2026-2027 edition is the last one that will ever be printed. Beginning in 2027, The Black Pages is moving to a digital platform—an app, an online marketplace, a new way for a small business with no website of its own to be found. Mr. Habersham is not retreating. He is doing in 2026 exactly what he did in 1991: going where his people are.
One day, Mr. Speaker, a young woman in Macon is going to open that final printed edition. She will run her finger down a column of small print. And she will find it—her grandmother's shop. The address. The telephone number. Proof, in black ink, that her people were here, that they built something, that they mattered enough to be listed.
She will never meet the man who put that name on the page. But she will weep over it just the same.
That is what Alex Habersham has been doing for thirty-five years. Not selling advertising. Preserving evidence—evidence that in Macon, Georgia, Black enterprise was never a footnote. It was a foundation.
to his children's children. Alex Habersham is leaving Middle Georgia an inheritance we can hold in our hands.
Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join my wife Vivian and me, along with the more than 765,000 people of Georgia's 2nd Congressional in congratulating Mr. Alex C. Habersham on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Macon-Middle Georgia Black Pages. I would also like for them to join us in thanking Mrs. Myrtle Habersham for her partnership and her sacrifice, and in wishing them both many more chapters yet to be written.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and may God bless the Habersham family, may God bless the city of Macon, and may God continue to bless these United States of America.