Eleanor Holmes Norton

Eleanor Holmes Norton has spent her life in public service pushing for equal representation, from helping organize activists during the civil rights movement to her decades-long effort to make the District of Columbia a state.

Norton joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement and helped organize the 1963 March on Washington.

As an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in 1970, Norton represented female employees at Newsweek who had filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleging sex discrimination. The women won the case and Newsweek agreed to give them equal opportunities as men to work as reporters. Norton ultimately became the first woman to chair the EEOC less than a decade later.

She has served as the District of Columbia’s delegate since 1991, which allows her to hold committee seats and participate in debates. But she cannot cast votes on the House floor.

Norton has pushed legislation to grant the District statehood with voting representation in both the House and Senate. Her bill passed in the House for the first time this summer, and its tenets are now a part of the official Democratic Party platform. But Republicans in control of the Senate remain opposed.

“It is long past time to apply the nation’s oldest slogan, ‘no taxation without representation,’ and the principle of consent of the governed to District of Columbia residents,” Norton said when the bill passed in June.

— Cristina Marcos