Eleanor Holmes Norton

née Eleanor Holmes (born 1937)

“I will not yield, sir!”

Years in political office: 1977–present

Position: delegate to the US House of Representatives from Washington, DC, 1991–present; chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1977–1981

Party affiliation: Democrat

Hometown: Washington, DC

Top causes: Washington, DC, voting rights; college tuition support; and nuclear disarmament

Life Story

This third-generation Washington, DC, resident is the eldest of three sisters. Her middle-class family was led by a schoolteacher mom and government worker father. Norton became aware of the civil rights movement at the age of twelve, when her community members picketed a department store that would take Black shoppers’ money for purchases but not let them use its restroom. As a child, she attended racially segregated schools. She remembers her teachers crying from joy when the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.

She went on to attend Ohio’s Antioch College, where she became the leader of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). While studying to become a civil rights lawyer at Yale Law School, she spent her free time coordinating actions for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). At one point, she even met face-to-face with influential civil rights leader Medgar Evers. In 1963 she provided administrative support for the two-hundred-thousand-person March on Washington that many say laid the groundwork for the passage of the Civil Rights Act a year later.

In 1970, five years after she was appointed the assistant legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Norton took issue with the extremely limited number of roles for women in the journalism industry. Representing sixty women employees of Newsweek, she successfully sued the company for gender discrimination, asserting that the publication only hired men as reporters and forcing the publication to give women better employment access.

Norton took free speech quite seriously, so much so that on more than one occasion she fought on behalf of clients who held beliefs light-years away from her own. She represented pro-segregation presidential candidate George Wallace, who had been barred from using New York City’s Shea Stadium for a campaign rally by the mayor. “I loved the idea of looking a racist in the face,” she explained. “Remember, this was a time when racism was much more alive and well than it is today—and saying, ‘I am your lawyer, sir. What are you going to do about that?’ ”

When President Jimmy Carter appointed Norton head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1977, she and her husband, Edward Norton, headed back to DC. There, Norton worked to establish some of the country’s first federal guidelines around sexual harassment in the workplace. She stayed in the position for four years. In 1982 she became a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.

Norton managed to win her first election to the US House of Representatives in 1990 even after a controversy emerged over her and her husband’s failure to file tax returns from 1982 to 1989. She won again in 2010 despite the publication of a voice message of her asking a lobbyist for a campaign donation—essentially, a request for a bribe to have her work on their issue. She continues to handily defeat her opponents for the position—in 2018 she batted off Kim Ford, a former member of the Obama administration, by winning 76.7 percent of the vote. Norton says, even as she approaches three decades in office, that she sees no reason to retire. Divorced from her husband, she lives with her adult daughter, Katherine, who has Down syndrome.

What’s on Her Agenda

The residents of Washington, DC, despite living in the US capital, are the only mainland US citizens with no vote on the floor of the House or the Senate. (Five noncontinental US territories also don’t have floor votes: American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.) That DC isn’t a state also provides political cover for the continued geographic lapse in democracy in the nation’s capital. But the omission is also largely based on racial injustice. In the 1950s, Washington, DC, would become the country’s first major city with a majority Black population. Well before that, white politicians saw the growing Black community as a political threat to their control over the city. In 1874 Congress abolished the District’s city council and mayor in favor of appointed commissioners, effectively taking self-rule away from DC.

It wasn’t until 1961 that the DC residents regained the right to vote for president. Washington, DC, must seek congressional approval for its own city budgets and continues without some voting rights—despite the fact that the District is home to more people than either Vermont or Wyoming. That means Norton cannot vote, even on legislation she helped author, except in committee before a bill is ready to go to its final floor decision. But she can speak, and she will be heard. “I will not yield, sir!” she once roared at a fellow representative who attempted to cut her off while she was speaking on the history of her city. “The District of Columbia has spent 206 years yielding to people that would deny them the vote. I yield you no ground.”

Voting rights have been one of Norton’s key issues. On occasion, she has managed to bring the issue to a vote, as in 2007 with the District of Columbia House Voting Rights Act. The bill would have added two seats in the US House: one for DC and one for a conservative-leaning part of Utah—a package deal meant to entice the Republicans into supporting the proposal. But though the bill passed the House, Senate Republicans filibustered the bill, and it was defeated.

Political allies on the issue have been hard to come by. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama said he supported DC voting rights but didn’t mention it in the White House. Some have criticized Norton’s lack of solid gains toward getting DC political self-determination, calling her complacent. But Norton hasn’t been entirely unsuccessful. She has, on occasion, been extended senatorial courtesy in recommending DC’s federal judges, the US attorney, and federal law enforcement officeholders, a right granted to her by Presidents Clinton and Obama. She also managed to broker the passage of legislation that grants up to $10,000 for qualified Washington, DC, residents who attend college.

Awesome Achievements

• Norton cofounded the National Black Feminist Organization in 1973.
• She was the first woman to lead the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—no wonder she was responsible for groundbreaking work against gender-based harassment.
• Norton was one of only three Black women in Congress when she first took office in 1991.

Quotables

“It was important to foster the notion of solidarity that no single woman should ever have to [sue their employer on the basis of gender-based discrimination]. But if all of us do it, then we have something real here.”

“It’s time that the District of Columbia told the Congress to go straight to hell.”

“I am deep DC.”