Norton Open Letter Enlightens Senate about Some D.C. History to Shed (9/17/07)

Norton Open Letter Enlightens Senate about Some D.C. History to Shed
September 17, 2007

Washington, DC-Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) today at a Senate rally with D.C. elected officials and national civil rights and local voting rights advocates released an open letter to colleagues in the Senate that she wrote as a citizen on behalf of "citizens like me who have never had representation [and] residents who arrived yesterday only to lose it." Norton said she was writing because she believed few Senators know the history of the use of filibuster against citizens here or would want to be associated with it, if they did. She wrote of witnessing as a child the "high drama" of filibusters that helped to send her to the Mississippi Delta as a student in the civil rights movement. "Those filibusters sought to maintain a status quo that had been required by the Southern states," Norton wrote. "If successful, a filibuster of our bill would maintain a different status quo required by the Congress of the United States. Regardless of motivation, the effect is the same for citizens denied the right to be even considered for representation in the "People's House," where their own local laws must be approved, and citizens also are denied the right to a court test where voting rights questions are settled." Norton gave the post-Civil War Republicans credit for giving D.C. home rule, a delegate and equal civil rights until Reconstruction, when Congress ended democracy here and the city "became a segregated city governed by the Congress through three appointed commissioners." The full text of Norton's letter follows.

An Open Letter to Members of the United States Senate from
Eleanor Holmes Norton, an American Citizen Living in the Nation's Capital

September 17, 2007

You will be casting a historic vote Tuesday to either filibuster or to allow a voting rights bill for seats only in the House of Representatives for the District of Columbia and for Utah to be considered by the Senate. I am writing as an American citizen who was born and raised in the District in the third generation of the Holmes family. Today, citizens like me who have never had representation struggle alongside residents who arrived yesterday only to lose it. The loss is the same for all of us. I do not believe that most members of the Senate are aware of the roots of the District's non-voting status or would want to be associated with the filibusters and filibuster threats that have denied many citizens of the nation's capital their rights for more than two centuries. I believe, instead, that most Senators would want to make a clean break from that history, as they did last year when the Senate passed the 1965 Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, and Coretta Scott King Voting Rights Act Reauthorization and Amendments Act of 2006. Even those Senators who doubt our bill's constitutionality, would not want to be recorded today, I believe, in support of a filibuster against even considering a vote for American citizens who live in the capital of the United States.

I have been so saturated with today's challenges that I hadn't much thought about my childhood here until the specter of a filibuster of our voting rights bill recalled memories of the great progress we have made as a nation had submerged deep in the recesses of my mind. When I was a kid, the District was not a very political town because the city had no elected officials and no democratic institutions. But Senate filibusters were high drama. Senators who chose to filibuster had to previously hold the floor in hopes of killing the bill. The filibusters that seized the nation's attention sought to deny equal rights to African Americans. These filibusters stirred my youthful consciousness and were part of what sent me to Mississippi as a student in the civil rights movement. Those filibusters sought to maintain a status quo that had been required by the southern states. If successful, a filibuster of our bill would maintain a different status quo required by the Congress of the United States. Regardless of motivation, the effect is the same for citizens who are denied the right to be even considered for representation in the "People's House," where their own local laws must be approved, and citizens also are denied the right to a court test where voting rights questions are settled.

Republicans who controlled the Congress after the Civil War gave the District home rule, its first delegate, and equal civil rights. With the end of Reconstruction and the Tilden-Hayes Compromise that withdrew federal troops from the South, Congress ended the city's democracy in its infancy in 1878, and "the national government took the line of the Deep South. . ."** The District became a segregated city governed by the Congress through three appointed commissioners.

My great grandfather, Richard Holmes, was a runaway slave living in the District in 1862 when Congress emancipated slaves here nearly a year before the Emancipation Proclamation. That was a unique moment in the District's history. Today, 144 years later I ask Senators to act in the same tradition and cast another vote for freedom for Americans who choose to live in the capital of our country.

Sincerely,

Eleanor Holmes Norton