Philly breast-cancer fighter Fran Visco is among those honored with the Presidential Citizens Medal

President Joe Biden awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal — the nation’s highest civilian honor — to several individuals from the region on Thursday, including Bella Vista resident Fran Visco, a West Catholic Girls’ High School graduate who is the longtime president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition.

“I’m incredibly honored for myself and for everyone in the coalition,” Visco, a breast cancer survivor and the daughter of a registered nurse and a printer, said in a brief interview Thursday morning. Visco, 76, is a graduate of St. Joseph’s University and Villanova University’s Charles Widger School of Law, and has been president of the coalition since 1992.

In 2015, Science magazine said that Visco “may be the most influential nonscientist ever in the field of breast cancer research.” The West Philadelphia native turned her attention to the disease after 13 years as a partner at the law firm of Cohen Shapiro Polisher Shiekman & Cohen, devoting herself to running the coalition, a collaboration of activists, survivors, researchers, policymakers, and others dedicated to advocacy and to support of breast cancer research.

“We’ve never been a pink ribbon-wearing kind of organization,” Visco said, referring to the universal symbol for breast cancer awareness. “We want the public to understand that breast cancer is not soft, or pink, or pretty.”

Along with Visco, three other people with regional roots were honored with the Presidential Citizens Medal, which was awarded to 20 individuals nationwide. They include former U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley (D., N.J.); Louis Lorenzo Redding, Delaware’s first Black lawyer; and Collins J. Seitz, who was a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from Delaware. Both Redding and Seitz were honored posthumously. The honors were awarded at a White House ceremony Thursday.

Bradley, a Princeton University graduate, Olympian, and former basketball player for the New York Knicks, served as a New Jersey senator from 1979 to 1997. He was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in the 2000 election, and lost to Vice President Al Gore. In 2020, he endorsed Biden and campaigned for him. He has authored six books on American politics, culture, and economy, and performed in a one-person play he wrote about his life and work, Rolling Along, which became a film. Bradley sponsored or cosponsored Senate bills to support women’s health, protect ocean shores, and improve child support, among other legislation.

Redding grew up in Wilmington and graduated from Howard High School in 1919, according to the Redding Consortium for Educational Equity. In 1929, Redding became the first Black lawyer in Delaware. In 1950, he won a landmark case that resulted in the desegregation of the University of Delaware. He also presented legal arguments that helped bring about the desegregation of schools in Claymont and Hockessin, Del., in the 1950s.

In 1954, Redding assisted Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the Brown v. Board of Education case, which struck down the “separate but equal” system of public school segregation across the country. He died at age 96 in 1998 in Lima, Delaware County.

Seitz, who was born in Wilmington in 1914 and was a graduate of the University of Delaware, served as a senior federal appeals court judge in the city after being nominated by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966. He is credited with helping to dismantle the “separate but equal” doctrine that propped up segregated school systems because of his 1952 court order that Delaware’s public schools must desegregate, a ruling cited in the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1954 decision striking down segregation. Seitz died in Wilmington in 1998.

Biden also awarded a medal to Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming Republican member of Congress who lost her seat after taking a leadership role on the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that criticized President-elect Donald Trump.

Cheney campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris in the Philadelphia suburbs during the fall.