Joan Steinau Lester

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword: Coretta Scott King
Introduction

PART ONE: “FULL OF THE FAITH THAT THE DARK PAST HAS TAUGHT US”

Chapter 1 The Ancestors
Chapter 2 The Day was Bright
Chapter 3 Far from U Street

PART TWO: “FULL OF THE HOPE THAT THE PRESENT HAS BROUGHT US”

Chapter 4 Ballots, Bullets and Books
Chapter 5 A Pivotal Year
Chapter 6 Free Speech—for All

PART THREE: “LET US MARCH ON”

Chapter 7 An Unexpected Motherhood
Chapter 8 Madame Commissioner
Chapter 9 Brand-New Law
Chapter 10 Exile

PART FOUR: “TILL VICTORY IS WON”

Chapter 11 An Election Explodes
Chapter 12 Warrior on the Hill
Chapter 13 Under Attack
Chapter 14 Mr. President: “Yes, Eleanor”

Acknowledgements
Interviews
End Notes
Index

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Theodore Parker, 1810-1860, Unitarian minister and abolitionist orator

INTRODUCTION

In October, 1991, law professor Anita Hill stunned the nation by charging that Clarence Thomas, President George Bush’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, had sexually harassed her.
Seven Congresswomen strode to the Capitol to demand the Senate hear Hill’s account. One was Eleanor Holmes Norton, Thomas’ predecessor as chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where she had authored the very harassment guidelines he was accused of breaking.
When the women climbed the long Capitol steps, Norton’s erect posture, radiating force, said it all. At the Senate, she and her counterparts insisted on a hearing for Hill. Norton said then, “If nothing happened and the whole thing went away, the guidelines weren’t worth the paper they were written on.”
The hearing electrified the nation: Hill’s dismissive treatment resonated with women accustomed to being disbelieved. And Norton, who has found one flash point after another—from arguing free speech for the most notorious segregationists of her day to battling for the disenfranchised citizens of Washington, D.C.—had once again helped shape a pivotal moment.

I first met Eleanor Holmes at Antioch College in 1958, when she was a worldly twenty-one to my green eighteen. Just after the height of the Red Scare, I was thrilled to meet a real-live radical. Not to mention a Negro. This smart-talking, fast-walking woman fascinated me, as she did much of the campus.
Eleanor was skinny and firm and knew what she wanted. I felt fat and round, though photos of the time show me as slender as she. But confused and formless, I felt shapeless, whereas she seemed all form and shape, a steely diamond ready to cut to her clear-eyed goals.
I was flattered when she sought my company; on long walks we discussed politics and life. Soon she went off to Yale Law School; coincidentally, I worked in New Haven and joined her on civil rights picket lines. One Saturday afternoon, picketing Woolworth’s, I invited the mostly-black demonstrators over to my small apartment for a party. Minutes after they arrived, car-loads of police filed in to clear the mixed-race group. On Monday morning I was evicted. Eleanor said, “Fight it!” That hadn’t entered my mind.
In the forty years since, her strongly-expressed opinions—on everything from free speech to war, and vitamins to welfare--have both educated and infuriated me, sometimes simultaneously. Passionate, ever ready to argue and armed with statistics to back a point, she’ll take on any subject. Her vehement views still rankle, but ultimately, I’ve discovered, Eleanor is usually proven right.

My overarching questions were: How did this ebullient debater escape the limitations typically imposed on women, to become a national figure? What circumstances molded this “force of nature”? And who, deep down, is she?
My research followed all the usual trails of archives and interviews: scores with Eleanor, almost a hundred with colleagues, family and friends. Their cooperation as I probed, month after month and year after year, rewarded my quest. I have satisfied myself, at least, with answers. I also got a windfall: glimpses of the pure, sweet core referred to by several of her closest friends and relatives. On my birthday this year, I was astonished to pick up the phone and hear a soft alto voice singing Happy Birthday, dear Joan. Like other ground-breaking women of her generation, Eleanor has had to be armored and tough, buttressing her naturally argumentative character. But it has been a gift to witness the warrior’s complexity.
I am also inspired by how closely she has stayed the course, lo these forty years. She has never let go of her original goals, or her passion to fulfill them. “It is people like Eleanor who keep my eye on the prize,” affirms Peabody award winner Charlayne Hunter-Gault, herself no novice at equity efforts.
Twinned with Norton’s extraordinary story is that of her city, Washington D.C., home to her family for four generations. The District’s own long travails, as a unique federal enclave fighting for self government, congressional representation and statehood, are entwined with those of its embattled delegate. That she is now her city’s voice in Congress is a miracle match.
Over time she will be dissected with other questions; her life will flow from many pens. Let legal scholars, civil rights historians, political scientists and others examine this fertile ground. This is her story as I am privileged to be the first to tell it.
It begins in the 1850s, deep in the heart of a Laroline, Virginia plantation, where Richard John Holmes was enslaved with his siblings and parents, Richard and Ann. Our fragmentary knowledge suggests this tale of escape, fleshing out the bare fact of flight handed down in family lore.

PROLOGUE

All signs were propitious: the plantation owner was away, the overseer and “ole miss” were both in bed with flu, and there was enough moonlight to illuminate the path, but not so much to make him an easy target. Young Richard John Holmes had waited years for this moment. He summoned his will and put a piece of salt herring and ash cake into a bandana. He slipped his worn Bible in his pocket along with a tiny compass, telling only those who needed to know, so others would not be laden with his secret—forbidden knowledge that could bring any punishment. So many people had recently made the clandestine journey north, especially from Virginia, that measures had tightened. But Richard Holmes had resolved to go, and this would be the night.
All day he gave penetrating looks at friends, longing for good-byes, wishing he could take them with him. Most of those he’d known since childhood had been sold off in recent years, going down with thousands of others into the vast cotton fields of Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana and the Mississippi delta.
Late in the evening Richard crept away, leaving behind the landscape of his birth, fleeing those who fettered his body, but not his ever-active mind. All night he kept to small back roads, some no more than trails, wading through water whenever he could to throw off bloodhounds; he walked ‘til morning, when he lay warily in damp bushes near a dirt road trying to sleep. But as the sun slowly crossed the sky he was alert. Even this little road could carry the ever-present bounty hunters and slave traders.
When dusk finally blanketed the road, Richard left his hiding place and walked again the second night, guided by stars and hearsay. He knew how to read the night and assess weather for direction. His fellow captives had pieced together enough information from conversations overheard and from skilled slaves--harness-makers, tanners, and blacksmiths sent out to work on neighboring plantations--that Richard Holmes had a detailed map in his head. He knew what spots to avoid. And although literacy for slaves was illegal, he’d learned to read from a woman who worked in the house, where the white children showed her their daily lessons .
Late on his second night out, Richard made his way to a large house where a cook stayed up, baking and waiting. While the owners of the household slept upstairs in their beds, she took up a plank in the kitchen floor and hid him in a tiny space lined with a quilt, hushing him as she hurried him into his hiding place. Richard slept fitfully all day, and by night was ready to set out again, this time carrying a small bundle of biscuits and a scrap of dried pork, wrapped in old cloth. He walked again through the starry night, each footstep carrying him farther away from all that he knew.
And so he traveled, walking by night, sent from one refuge to another. He shivered in rain, walked across creeks, was dazed with fatigue. Just before dawn one morning, faint with thirst, Richard Holmes saw the dark waters of the Potomac River. It looked exactly as he’d heard it would: muddy and marshy, with narrower spots where brush grew into the water. He crept toward its banks crouching low, for the waning moon still cast his shadow. Spying no one, he paused, then saw the Long Bridge. His heart contracting as much from fear as chill, he managed to keep his wits about him and stole toward it. Reaching its entrance, he stood resolutely and began to walk, not daring to run, should anyone see him at this early hour.
For ten agonizing minutes Richard moved rapidly, his heart thumping with fear and exertion. As the sky crackled pink and dew shimmered on the grass, his heart leapt, this time with joy, when his feet touched land. A shiver went through his body; he stepped off the road into an alley in Southwest Washington, sobs racked his body and he sank to his knees, thanking the Lord who brought him through.



CHAPTER 1: THE ANCESTORS (Opening Excerpt)

The city into which Richard Holmes stepped was a city of contradictions. In the heart of world democracy, human slavery was legal. The recently passed Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had ensured his vulnerability to recapture, for crossing a state line was no longer sure protection: those who captured fugitives would be rewarded and harboring refugees was a crime. If found, Richard Holmes could legally be whipped, resold or even executed.
“Nor do I exaggerate how I understand my great-grandfather came here,” his great-granddaughter Eleanor Holmes Norton says a hundred and fifty years later, shaking her head in her plush Congressional office. “Walked off a plantation in Virginia, walked across the bridge. My grandfather told me this story, told it with enormous pride, and passed that pride on to us.
“Richard walked across the District line, because there you could get work, and the white man couldn’t get you unless he could find you. They were building Washington and hired people off the streets every day. My grandfather says that, moreover, under the law, you could come here and get your slave and take him back. The city was swarming with all kinds of blacks: you couldn't tell one from another because Washington had a large number of free blacks. And white people would come from all over looking for their slave.”

In the bustling Washington of the 1850s, Richard Holmes, like thousands of fugitives before him, made his way in a shadow economy. Southwest Washington was home to large numbers of fugitives; twenty-seven neighborhood churches provided relief, and the area housed many stops on the underground railroad. Escaped slaves were welcomed in this part of town. Probably living in a one-room shanty with a dozen others, he soon found work, according to Eleanor, on a construction gang.
“Remember, he came to a city where the Capitol itself,” she roars, “was built in part with slave labor, and blacks free and slave were used throughout the city to build the official buildings and develop the historic streets. Tough as it was, it beat working for nothing as a slave in Virginia.” Foremen on construction sites, needing ready and cheap workers during a building boom, often didn’t ask questions--especially when they could pay a fraction of what they’d pay their white workers or even their slave labor, hired from local owners.
Depending on the kindness of others and his own well-honed wits, crafted for survival, Richard made his way in the city. After only a few weeks, another day came for which he had rigorously prepared. According to family history, handed down generation by generation, while Richard shoveled mud on the side of a road, a white man stalked up and shouted, “Richard!”
Richard didn’t flinch, didn’t so much as move a muscle; he simply kept shoveling. His former owner accosted the foreman,
“That’s my nigger! I’d recognize that nigger anywhere!”
“Looks to me like he ain’t your Richard,” the foreman replied. “He didn’t answer to you. I saw him. He didn’t pay you no mind.”
Rebuffed by the insistence of the foreman, the white man finally gave up. With no way to prove his ownership of this particular disinterested black man, he wandered away. Perhaps he had made a mistake.
So Richard Holmes was, by his own hand, a free man.
“It’s enough to inspire anybody,” she says. “My great-grandfather clearly had been waiting for that day. Yes, he had disciplined himself to know that the day could come and he told himself, ‘Wait for that day. And when that day comes, make sure that you do not know who that man is. He must have practiced the inner discipline not to instinctively respond, even to what every human being responds to: his name! Here’s a man who thought ahead.”