Norton Remarks on Douglass Statue Unveiling

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Nettie Douglass, the great-great granddaughter of Frederick Douglass, spoke, along with Vice President Joe Biden, House and Senate leaders and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) today, Wednesday, June 19, 2013, at 11:00 a.m., in the Capitol's Emancipation Hall at the unveiling of the District of Columbia's Frederick Douglass statue. After a decade-plus fight by Norton, the District, for the first time, joins the 50 states with a statue in the Capitol.

Norton's remarks, as prepared for delivery, follow.

Remarks of Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton
Frederick Douglass Statue Unveiling
June 19, 2013, Emancipation Hall, United States Capitol

Mr. Vice President, Speaker Boehner, Majority Leader Reid, Democratic Leader Pelosi, Republican Leader McConnell, Senator Schumer, Howard Professor Dr. Edna Medford and Douglass family, led by its matriarch, Ms. Nettie Douglass, great-great granddaughter of Frederick Douglass, who we are particularly pleased to welcome to the Capitol today. It took a community to choose Frederick Douglass to represent the District of Columbia in the Capitol, joining statues from the 50 states, but it took the entire Congress to bring the statue to the Capitol today. I especially thank D.C. residents, who selected Frederick Douglass to represent the District in the Capitol.

Our residents are accustomed to hosting national and international figures who make the District their home. None, before or since Douglass, however, has so joined his national prominence and philosophy with the aspirations of the people of the District of Columbia. Douglass lived here for 23 of his 57 years as a free man. He knew and felt deeply about where he lived. He refused to separate his life in the District from the equality theme of his courageous life, rising from bondage to become the world's most prominent abolitionist and a leader of the women's suffrage movement, acknowledged even in his lifetime as one of the greatest Americans.

The District of Columbia shares Douglass with Maryland and New York, but few know, much less have honored, Douglass for his active life as a resident of the District, which he made his home town, building his home, Cedar Hill, here, now a National Historic Site in Anacostia, in Southeast Washington, D.C. Too few know how Douglass imbedded himself in the life of the District of Columbia, serving, for example, for most of his years here as a Howard University Trustee, even as he traveled the country and the world. There has been too little recognition that as a District of Columbia resident, three Republican presidents appointed Douglass to three local posts: to what was then the upper chamber of the D.C. Council, part of the home-rule government given the District by the Republican Congress and President during Reconstruction, as D.C. Recorder of Deeds and as U.S. Marshal for the local and federal courts here. Who knew that Douglass lost the Republican nomination for delegate to the House of Representatives? Fewer still know of his unflagging insistence on congressional voting rights and on independent self-government, a struggle the residents of the District of Columbia continue to this day. For Douglass, the District was no mere address. He lived what he stood for wherever he lived.

Some may know of my strongly held views that D.C. residents should enjoy equal congressional voting and self-government rights with other Americans. I must defer, however, to Mr. Douglass, whose fervor on this issue is unmatched by any I know or have heard on the subject. At a meeting on District suffrage in 1895, for example, Douglass spoke defiantly that he was present at the meeting "to take sides," notwithstanding "the frowns nor the smiles of the present government." He called the residents of the District "aliens, not citizens, but subjects" and said that they had "plenty of taxation, but no representation in the great questions of politics in the country." Mr. Douglass did not mince his words, but spoke with fearless militancy in the voice of a local D.C. citizen at the height of his international celebrity. Today, perhaps his most famous words, "agitate, agitate, agitate," inspire the District's determination to become a state.

Douglass's life as an active D.C. resident and his deep commitment to our equal rights are the reasons that his statue is here to be unveiled today as a gift from the almost 650,000 American citizens of the District of Columbia. These are the reasons that the D.C. Council authorized the statue of Frederick Douglass. The marvelously wrought statue stands seven feet tall. Frederick Douglass stood even taller when he lent his stature as a world leader to his home town and refused to temper his demand for congressional voting rights and local self-government for the residents of the District of Columbia. This, too, was the great Douglass, that is, Frederick Douglass of the District of Columbia.

Published: June 19, 2013