Congressman Fattah Travels to North Carolina for Second of 4 Commencement Addresses This Spring

PHILADELPHIA, May 6 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Congressman Chaka Fattah (D-PA) will travel to North Carolina Saturday May 8 to deliver the Spring Commencement address at Elizabeth City (N.C.) State University and receive an honorary degree, continuing a Commencement season in which he will deliver four addresses and accept three honorary degrees.

He will also be the commencement speaker for Philadelphia University on May 16 and for Philadelphia regional graduates of the University of Phoenix on June 12. The honorary degrees will be the seventh, eighth and ninth he has received.

Elizabeth City, a historically black institution in the University of North Carolina system, will be awarding 254 degrees. Graduation ceremonies begin at 9 a.m. Saturday in Roebuck Stadium. Fattah will be receiving an honorary degree as part of the program.

Fattah's first commencement this year came on Sunday May 2 when he invoked powerful but little-known history at Lincoln University in Chester County, Penna., concerning its ties to a poet who inspired a movie, the first president of Ghana – and to Albert Einstein.

As part of outdoor exercises at the Lincoln's track and field facility, the Congressman received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. More than 400 graduates gained bachelor's and graduate diplomas on a sweltering day before more than 6,000 family, faculty and guests.

Congressman Fattah, Chair of the Congressional Urban Caucus and a member of the House Appropriations Committee, has won numerous honors and recognition as an innovative and effective advocate for education reform throughout his 27-year career in Congress and the Pennsylvania Legislature.

He is the Congressional architect of GEAR UP (Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs). It is the nation's largest pre-college awareness program, serving more than 10 million students and providing more than $3 billion toward the educational advancement and college readiness of low-income students, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

In the 111th Congress, Fattah wrote the American Opportunity Tax Credit, funded at $14 billion in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act enacted last year. The legislation provides a $2,500 partially refundable tax credit for tuition and other higher education expenses for college students or their parents for tax years 2009 and 2010. He has authored several education bills pending in the House.

Congressman Fattah attended schools in his hometown of Philadelphia from elementary to post-graduate, earning the Masters Degree of Government Administration (M.G.A.) from the University of Pennsylvania, Fels Institute of Government (as it is now known), in 1986. He is the recipient of the Samuel S. Fels Award for Alumni Achievement from Fels, awarded in 2000, "honoring his distinguished leadership and numerous accomplishments in public service."

At Lincoln , Fattah traced the extraordinary history of the historically black university, founded in 1854 and renamed for Abraham Lincoln after his assassination. That legacy, he said, carries with it significant responsibility.

"You are significant signposts along life's highways. This says that you are headed in the right direction," the Philadelphia congressman told graduates. "Your success is not graduating from Lincoln University , but taking the responsibility of achieving leadership."

After mentioning prominent alumni Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and writer-poet Langston Hughes he turned to figures whose connection with Lincoln is not so well known: Kwame Nkrumah, '39, first president of modern Ghana and a pioneer in the pan-African democracy movement, and Melvin B. Tolson, '24, the Modernist poet and educator who inspired the 2007 movie, "The Great Debaters," with Denzel Washington in the role of Tolson.

Fattah's most remarkable history lesson involved Albert Einstein, the famous nuclear physicist who delivered a speech and received university honors at Lincoln on May 3, 1946.

"Einstein turned down all sorts of honorary degrees in the last 20 years of his life. But he made an exception for Lincoln and broke his 'no' rule because he saw it as an opportunity to not be complicit in the racism of his day," Fattah said.

Yet Einstein's landmark speech and visit to Lincoln drew virtually no coverage in 1946 except from the Philadelphia Tribune. Fattah acknowledged the presence on Sunday of the Tribune's President and CEO Robert Bogle, who was among those receiving honorary degrees from Lincoln .

SOURCE Office of Congressman Chaka Fattah