• Celebrity
    • OTE – Screen Kings
    • Daniel Kaluuya Digital Cover
    • Digital Cover Method Man
    • Digital Cover Zazie
    • Celebrity News
    • ‘Yes, Girl!’ Podcast
    • Entertainment
    • Black Celeb Couples
    • Celebrity Moms
    • Red Carpet
    • If Not For My Girls
  • Fashion
    • ESSENCE Fashion House 2022
    • Fashion News
    • Street Style
    • Accessories
    • Fashion Week
  • Beauty
    • Best In Black Beauty 2023
    • ESSENCE Hair Awards 2022
    • AVEENO Skin Health Startup Accelerator
    • Beauty News
    • Skin
    • Makeup
    • Nails
    • Girls United: Beautiful Possibilities
  • Hair
    • Hair News
    • Natural
    • Relaxed
    • Transitioning
    • Weave
    • 4C
  • Love
    • Love & Sex News
    • The Solve Podcast
    • Weddings
    • Parenting
    • Relationships
  • Lifestyle
    • Black History Month
    • ESSENCE Gift Guide 2022
    • ESSENCE + smartwater Live Well Challenge
    • Build Your Legacy 2022
    • Dream & Plan with Confidence Prudential
    • AMEX Platinum Travel
    • Homecoming Season 2022
    • Lifestyle News
    • Health & Wellness
    • ESSENCE Eats
    • Money & Career
    • Entrepreneurship
    • Travel
    • Food & Drink
    • Black Travel Guide
  • News
    • Latest News
    • Paint The Polls Black
    • Raise Your Voice
    • Culture
    • Politics
  • Video
  • Festival
    • 2023 ESSENCE Festival Of Culture
    • 2022 Fest Videos
  • Events
    • 2023 Wellness House
    • 2023 Black Women In Hollywood
    • 2023 HOLLYWOOD HOUSE
    • 2023 ESSENCE Film Festival
    • 2022 Girls United Summit
    • 2022 ESSENCE Fashion House
    • 2022 Homecoming Season
    • She Got Now
    • Dear Black Men
    • I Am Speaking
    • Power Tools
  • Studios
  • Girls United

WHERE BLACK CULTURE, COMMUNITY AND CONSCIOUSNESS MEET

Sign up for ESSENCE Newsletters the keep the Black women at the forefront of conversation.

Your email is required.
Your email is in invalid format.
Confirm email is required.
Email did not match.
Select the newsletters you'd like to receive:
Please select at least one option.
By clicking Subscribe Now, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Skip to content
SUBSCRIBE
  • MAGAZINE
  • NEWSLETTER
  • Celebrity
    • OTE – Screen Kings
    • Daniel Kaluuya Digital Cover
    • Digital Cover Method Man
    • Digital Cover Zazie
    • Celebrity News
    • ‘Yes, Girl!’ Podcast
    • Entertainment
      • The State Of R&B
    • Black Celeb Couples
    • Celebrity Moms
    • Red Carpet
    • If Not For My Girls
  • Fashion
    • ESSENCE Fashion House 2022
    • Fashion News
    • Street Style
    • Accessories
    • Fashion Week
  • Beauty
    • Best In Black Beauty 2023
    • ESSENCE Hair Awards 2022
    • AVEENO Skin Health Startup Accelerator
    • Beauty News
    • Skin
    • Makeup
    • Nails
    • Girls United: Beautiful Possibilities
  • Hair
    • Hair News
    • Natural
    • Relaxed
    • Transitioning
    • Weave
    • 4C
  • Love
    • Love & Sex News
    • The Solve Podcast
    • Weddings
    • Parenting
    • Relationships
  • Lifestyle
    • Black History Month
    • ESSENCE Gift Guide 2022
    • ESSENCE + smartwater Live Well Challenge
    • Build Your Legacy 2022
    • Dream & Plan with Confidence Prudential
    • AMEX Platinum Travel
    • Homecoming Season 2022
    • Lifestyle News
    • Health & Wellness
    • ESSENCE Eats
    • Money & Career
    • Entrepreneurship
    • Travel
    • Food & Drink
    • Black Travel Guide
  • News
    • Latest News
    • Paint The Polls Black
    • Raise Your Voice
    • Culture
    • Politics
  • Video
  • Festival
    • 2023 ESSENCE Festival Of Culture
    • 2022 Fest Videos
  • Events
    • 2023 Wellness House
    • 2023 Black Women In Hollywood
    • 2023 HOLLYWOOD HOUSE
    • 2023 ESSENCE Film Festival
    • 2022 Girls United Summit
    • 2022 ESSENCE Fashion House
    • 2022 Homecoming Season
    • She Got Now
    • Dear Black Men
    • I Am Speaking
    • Power Tools
  • Studios
  • Girls United
Home · News

Congress Holds Hearing To Consider Washington D.C. Statehood

Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced the historic legislation.
Congress Holds Hearing To Consider Washington D.C. Statehood
Eleanor Holmes Norton | Photo by Carlos Barria-Pool/Getty Images
By Donna M. Owens · Updated May 25, 2021

For Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, the issue of Washington, D.C. statehood is not only political, but personal. 

“My own family has lived through almost 200 years of change in D.C. since my great-grandfather Richard Holmes, as a slave, walked away from a plantation in Virginia and made his way to D.C.,” she testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. 

Monday’s hearing addressed H.R. 51, the Washington, D.C. Admission Act, which aims to make the nation’s capital America’s 51st state. Holmes Norton long-standing legislative efforts began in the 1990s, with the latest measure introduced on January 4, 2021. 

“We can no longer be sidelined in the democratic process. Full democracy requires much more,” she said. “Residents deserve full voting representation in the Senate and the House and complete control over their local affairs. They deserve statehood.”

Congress Holds Hearing To Consider Washington D.C. Statehood
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 22: Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser is greeted by DC Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton as she arrives to testify at a House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing on the District of Columbia statehood bill on Capitol Hill on March 22, 2021 in Washington, DC. As the House prepares to take up the issue of statehood for the District of Columbia, it was reported that a poll finds 54% of likely voters think D.C. should be a state, a record high level of support. (Photo by Carlos Barria-Pool/Getty Images)

An identical version of H.R. 51 was passed by the House of Representatives last year in the 116th Congress, but Republican leadership gave it no play in the Senate. However, with Democrats now in the White House and majorities in both chambers of Congress, many champions of the bill are hopeful.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-MD), have both committed to bringing the legislation to the House floor during the 117th Congress. To date, the measure has more than 200 cosponsors in the House. The Senate version of the bill (S. 51), sponsored by Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), has at least 40 cosponsors, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). 

“In 2019, we came before this Committee for the first time in nearly three decades and made an irrefutable moral and constitutional case for statehood,” said Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, who also testified before the committee. “We are even more united, organized, and prepared to demand D.C. statehood now for the generations of Washingtonians who have waited far too long for full and equal citizenship.”

Washington D.C. was established in 1790, as a permanent seat for the federal government. Virginia and Maryland each ceded land for a district that from the beginning was distinct from existing states.

Article continues after video.

Today, about 712,000 people call Washington, D.C. home. While traditionally largely African American, the current population is about 46 percent Black, per U.S. Census data. 

Despite its power, pomp and circumstance, Washingtonians have long lacked full self governance. Residents voted in their first presidential election in 1964, and only elected their own mayor in the 1970s, according to history posted by Destination DC, the official marketing arm of the region.

Washingtonians’ representation in Congress is limited to a non-voting delegate in the House of Representatives and two so-called “shadow“ Senators who also cannot cast votes. 

Many lawmakers and advocates have characterized the quest for D.C. statehood as a civil rights issue. Although residents pay federal taxes, serve in the military and vote as do fellow U.S. citizens, they have no official say in policy decisions that impact their lives. 

“The right to vote is meaningless if you cannot put anyone into office,” said Wade J. Henderson, interim president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “Washingtonians have been deprived of this right for more than two centuries – often on grounds that had nothing to do with Constitutional design, and everything to do with race – and remain so today.”

Until D.C. residents have a vote in Congress, he said, “they will not be much better off than African Americans in the South were prior to August 6, 1965, when President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. And until then, the efforts of the civil rights movement will remain incomplete.” 

Congress Holds Hearing To Consider Washington D.C. Statehood
WASHINGTON, DC – JUNE 05: People walk down 16th street after volunteers, with permission from the city, painted “Black Lives Matter” on the street near the White House on June 05, 2020 in Washington, DC. After seven days of protests in DC over the death of George Floyd, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser has renamed that section of 16th street “Black Lives Matter Plaza”. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Rep. Hoyer said the disenfranchisement of Washingtonians has had recent repercussions. 

“D.C. residents have been denied critical COVID-19 emergency funding based solely on where they live,” he said. “And, at the same time, they experienced a violent insurrection [at the U.S. Capitol] incited by former President Trump which resulted in the need for thousands of National Guard troops to move into the city and erect burdensome security measures.”

Holmes Norton believes that granting the district statehood would ensure that those who live in D.C., finally have the full representation they want and deserve.

“Eighty-six percent of D.C. residents voted for statehood in 2016. In fact, D.C. residents have been petitioning for voting rights in Congress and local autonomy for 220 years,” she told the committee.

The proposed addition to the union would be called “State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth”—paying homage to Maryland-born abolitionist Frederick Douglass who spent his final years in the district.

Congress would retain authority over two square miles of the Washington that many associate with politics and tourism: the White House, U.S. Capitol complex, the Supreme Court, federal monuments, and the National Mall. That area would be called the Capital.

According to Holmes Norton, H.R. 51 has the U.S. Constitution on its side. The Constitution does not establish any prerequisites for new states, but its Admissions Clause gives Congress the authority to admit new states.

“Congress has two choices,” she said. “It can continue to exercise undemocratic, autocratic authority over the American citizens who reside in our nation’s capital, treating them, in the words of Frederick Douglass, as “aliens, not citizens, but subjects.” Or it can live up to this nation’s promise and ideals, end taxation without representation and pass H.R. 51.”

Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) applauded Holmes Norton for her “fierce leadership” and tenacity in seeking to secure full equality for district residents.

“The fact that Americans living in the District of Columbia are denied representation in Congress is a historic wrong.”

TOPICS:  Eleanor Holmes Norton Muriel Bowser Washington D.C.
COMPANY INFORMATION
  • Our Company
  • Customer Service
  • Essence Ventures
  • Change Your Address
  • Contact Us
  • Job Opportunities
  • Internships
  • Media Kit
  • tag
SUBSCRIBE
  • Newsletters
  • Give a Gift of ESSENCE
  • Magazine Tablet Edition
FOLLOW US
MORE ON ESSENCE
  • Home
  • Love
  • Celebrity
  • Beauty
  • Hair
  • Fashion
  • ESSENCE festival

ESSENCE.com is part of ESSENCE Communications, Inc.

Essence may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.

©2023 ESSENCE Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved. | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Essence.com Advertising Terms

Get The ESSENCE Newsletter and
Special Offers delivered to your inbox

By clicking Sign Up, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Get The ESSENCE Magazine
by subscribing below
subscribe now