Motion to Discharge

Floor Speech

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Mr. YOUNG. Madam President, I rise today in tribute to Rev. Melvin Girton, the dean of pastors, a servant of God, and a great Hoosier. His death on October 29 has left a terrible absence, one that cannot be filled. For over half a century, from 1964 to 2015, Dr. Girton was pastor at the Christ Missionary Baptist Church--the same Indianapolis church home where he was baptized as a young boy.

The number of years Dr. Girton shepherded his flock is astonishing. The number of lives he touched and bettered among and beyond is incalculable. He made his church a family. He walked with his congregants through their lives, their challenges, and in difficult times, he reminded them to look up because brighter days were ahead. When one of his congregants needed surgery, she arrived at the hospital to find Dr. Girton waiting there to reassure her everything would be all right. And it was. He was a member of their families. He blessed their marriages, welcomed their children, and even taught them to buy cars and homes. And he prepared and opened the doors for countless other pastors to follow him.

Dr. Girton was also a great lover of history, which is fitting since he made a great deal of it himself. During the civil rights struggle, he led from the pulpit, on the picket lines, during the marches to the Governor's mansion, and he worked with Hoosiers from all walks of life. His work made great strides for equality and pushed Americans to realize our founding promise.

There was a time when Indianapolis's restaurants and theaters were segregated, its neighborhoods closed to Black citizens. If rising generations of Hoosiers have no memory of this shame, it is because men like Dr. Girton ended it. He fought to open up the city's businesses, to make access to housing equal.

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Girton sat all night with Robert F. Kennedy in his Indianapolis hotel room after the Senator told a heartbroken crowd of Martin Luther King, Jr's, murder. The next day, he organized a memorial to Dr. King at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument at the city's center. Indianapolis is one of the few metropolitan areas in America that did not erupt in violence after Dr. King's death. Senator Kennedy's beautiful and conciliatory speech is often credited for this, but the work of Dr. Girton and other city leaders played just as important a part.

Long after the civil rights movement, he preached kindness and love and labored to advance opportunity. He served as vice president for the Indianapolis branch of the NAACP. He was twice the vice president of the Billy Graham Crusade and regularly hosted the Emancipation Proclamation service, an annual celebration of that document of freedom.

Always searching for ways to help his neighbors, in the late 1990s, Dr. Girton transformed a boarded-up Indianapolis strip mall into a community center, providing job training, employment opportunities, a laundromat, a senior center, and even an ice cream shop.

When he reached the half-century mark at Christ Missionary, he called it a ``short 50 years.'' No wonder--five incredible decades in a life of great purpose.

He wasn't entirely comfortable with the term ``legend,'' but that is what he was. His passing deprives not just his community but his country of a pillar.

Despite the grief, it is hard not to be encouraged by such a wonderful life full of years of lasting achievements, courageous stands, admiring friends, and many loving children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Dr. Girton would often say: ``God is with me, God is in me, God works through me.'' He was and he did.

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