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REMARKS ON TERRI FREEMAN LEAVING THE NATIONAL CIVIL RIGHTS MUSEUM
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HON. STEVE COHEN
of tennessee
in the house of representatives
Monday, January 25, 2021
Mr. COHEN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to bid a reluctant farewell to Terri Lee Freeman, who for the past six years has served as President of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. Ms. Freeman has done an exceptional job leading the nation's premiere Civil Rights museum, located in the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. During her tenure, Ms. Freeman organized the 50th anniversary of that seminal event in American history--``MLK50--Where Do We Go From Here?''--featuring such national figures as our late Congressional colleague, John Lewis; the Reverend Jesse Jackson, former Polish President and 1983 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Walesa; the Reverend William Barber of the Poor People's Campaign, and many others who traveled from around the world to spend time in our showcase institution. In her six years, she saw the museum's budget double to
$9.7 million while overseeing a staff of 50 and an increased physical footprint. She also helped affiliate the museum with the Smithsonian Institution and its traveling exhibits. Also while at the museum, she began ``Unpacking Racism in Action,'' a series of community dialogues aimed at confronting implicit and structural bias. Last year, she was named ``Memphian of the Year'' by Memphis Magazine. Before moving to Memphis, she was president of what is now the Greater Washington Community Foundation. In her 18 years with that organization, she increased the organization's assets from $52 million in 1996 to more than $350 million in 2014. A proven leader, Ms. Freeman was a 2016 graduate of Leadership Memphis and served on the boards of the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis, the New Memphis Institute and the Memphis Convention and Visitors Bureau, as well as being a member of the Tennessee Educational Equity Coalition Steering Committee. Born in Chicago, Ms. Freeman is a graduate of Hamtramck High School (1977) and the University of Dayton (1981 through 1983) and received a Master's degree in organizational communications from Howard University. Ms. Freeman is married to Dr. Bowyer G. Freeman, senior pastor of the New Saint Mark Baptist Church in Baltimore, and the mother of three grown daughters. I wish Ms. Freeman every success in her new post as executive director of the Reginald Lewis Museum of African American History and Culture in Baltimore. I'm pleased to read that Ms. Freeman will always consider herself an ``adopted child'' of our city where her work and dedication will remain her lasting legacy.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 14
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