Norton Says Dr. King Spoke Up for D.C.’s Rights and So Will D.C. Residents by Marching on Saturday

August 25, 2011

WASHINGTON, DC -- Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) will join D.C. residents and other D.C officials at the D.C. Full Democracy Freedom March on Saturday, August 27, at 9:00 a.m. at Freedom Plaza, 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. The D.C. March on the day before the Martin Luther King, Jr. dedication, she said, is not about history or even the historic 1963 March on Washington, which Norton helped to organize as a staff member of the March. "Saturday's march is about the here and now of 600,000 D.C. citizens for whom the March on Washington has not yet borne fruit," Norton said. "It is just as important for residents to march for their own freedom on Saturday as it is to show up on Sunday to commemorate the freedom that has already been won for others. Who can doubt that Dr. King would believe that the best tribute to him would be for D.C. residents, the last to be freed, to march in his name for our own belated freedoms."

In a series of interviews this week, Norton described the King memorial dedication as a full circle experience for her that began in the summer of 1963 when she traveled as a Yale Law School student to Mississippi, where she spent the day with Medgar Evers the day he was assassinated; on to the Mississippi Delta to work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Fannie Lou Hamer; and the second half of that summer working in New York as a staff member of the March on Washington with Bayard Rustin, the organizer of the March; and culminating with the March where King made the speech that will be remembered on Sunday. Norton said that the summer of the March brought to a crescendo the civil rights movement, as voter registration drives and jailings lead up to the March that catalyzed the movement's greatest victories: the 1964 Civil Rights Act that established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which Norton became the first woman to chair just 13 years later, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the 1968 Fair Housing Act. During the summer of 1964, Norton was one of the writers of the legal brief presented by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the National Democratic Convention that challenged the segregated seating of the Mississippi Democratic Party (MEDP), and later that summer she ran the lobbying operation for the MEDP at the Atlantic City Convention.

"As significant as Sunday will be to commemorate the contributions of a great American with a memorial on the National Mall, Saturday is D.C.'s day to march to rededicate ourselves and to remind our country that what Dr. King's life has done for our country must also be done for the residents of the nation's capital."

Links to Norton's King memorial interviews follow: https://wapo.st/p8QMIq ;https://bit.ly/oYhOX5 ; https://n.pr/nDqSBw ; https://wapo.st/oYwE2m.