‘I Was Able to Participate in the Great Movements of My Time’
An interview with Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton
October 2004
Eleanor Holmes Norton came of age with the Civil Rights Movement. In the early 1960s, the woman who would become the District of Columbia’s nonvoting delegate to Congress was active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the leading civil rights organization made up of students and young people. Along with other SNCC legends like Robert Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, and John Lewis, she labored to break down segregation laws; specifically to win the vote for disenfranchised black citizens in Mississippi. By the late 1960s, Norton was a staff lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, where she represented the free-speech interests of individuals such as Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and former Alabama Governor George C. Wallace.
In 1970, New York Mayor John Lindsay appointed her to head his Commission on Human Rights; she was the first African American woman to hold that post. A few years later, President Jimmy Carter drafted Norton to come to Washington as the first woman to lead the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Norton sat down with special correspondent Claudia Dreifus and talked about her extraordinary experiences fighting for the rights of African Americans, women, and others—in the United States and abroad.
Where did you go to college?
Norton: Antioch. I went to college in 1955, in the middle of the McCarthy period, and I was yearning for activism. I had the feeling of a young person: “Give me something to do to get through this obvious injustice of segregation.”
I’d grown up in the segregated District of Columbia. I came from the conscious, educated African American community here, and we were taught from the time we were little children that we were living in a segregated city. The high school that I attended was Dunbar High School, for many years the college preparatory high school for African Americans in the District of Columbia, an institution where the teachers had doctorates because Dunbar was one of the only places where they could find employment. We were taught that the way to understand this was that God created all people equal, and to feel really sorry for those white people who are so ignorant that they would segregate people like us.
“I was very conscious of the injustice of segregation.”
So I was very conscious of the injustice of segregation. That was a good part of the reason I went to Antioch College. It was one of the few places in the ’50s where there was any real social activism, and I was burning to do something.
One of the first big national civil rights demonstrations I remember came while I was at Antioch. It was the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage right here in Washington. I still have the clearest picture in my mind of seeing Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Adam Clayton Powell, Martin Luther King, and black people from the South who came to the [Washington] Monument. I just couldn’t believe it! A mass march against segregation in the McCarthy era in Washington, led by Martin Luther King, who had just led the Montgomery Bus Boycott! The 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage was one of the first signs of a national stirring.
Did you decide early that you wanted to be a lawyer in order to serve this burgeoning Civil Rights Movement?
Norton: As the movement developed, I realized I wanted to be a civil rights lawyer. By 1960, when I graduated from Antioch and was getting ready to enter law school, I was already involved in the sit-in movement and being arrested. I’d been involved in sit-ins right outside of Washington, in Maryland, with students from Howard University—Stokely Carmichael among them.
When I applied to law schools in 1960—Yale, the University of Chicago, and NYU—I had an interesting experience. Scholarships for law school were rare, but NYU had the richest scholarship, the Root-Tilden, which I applied for. It paid for everything! I applied for it and they wrote me a letter saying, “Sorry, we do not award this scholarship to women.” I was so little a feminist at that time that I didn’t even recognize the sexism in that! I ended up going to Yale Law School.
How did you meet Medgar Evers?
Norton: This was 1963. It was summer break from law school and I was about to go to the Mississippi Delta, to help SNCC there. This was a period when there were few civil rights lawyers, let alone African American civil rights lawyers. I came into Jackson on my way to the Delta. Medgar Evers was this legend; he met me at the airport, taking me around Jackson to show me what he was doing. He badly needed a lawyer in Jackson to work with him and I think he wanted to convince me, “This is where you have to be.”
Black law students were just that rare. I met his wife and his children, and he kept saying, “We need your help here in Jackson.” And I said, “I’m committed to going to the Delta with SNCC.” That evening, he took me to the bus station. Later [that night] he was killed…in his own driveway.
Did you meet the woman who was to be your mentor there—Fannie Lou Hamer?
Norton: Well, she was my mentor. But she would never have thought of herself that way. I was in the SNCC office in Greenwood. A call came, saying that Mrs. Hamer and a few people had come from a conference elsewhere and now had been sent to jail in Winona, Mississippi, nine miles from Greenwood. Lawrence Guyot, who headed the SNCC office, had gone to get her out. And Lawrence Guyot had been put in jail. These young people said, “What shall we do?” I couldn’t just say, “Let’s wait till somebody who knows how to handle this gets here.” So I asked people to tell me everything they knew about Mrs. Hamer, about the local officials, about the town. People said that the only law enforcement person in the area who wasn’t in cahoots with the White Citizens Council was the police chief of Greenwood.
So I went to him and told him who I was and that I went to Yale Law School and that everyone knew I was going over to Winona to get these people out of jail. “I’ve heard you’re a decent person,” I said. “I’d like to ask that you call Winona and tell them I’m coming. I want you to do this so that we don’t have a bigger mess on our hands than we already have.”
He must have made that call because when I went to Winona, no one arrested me, or beat me. In fact, they took me to see Mrs. Hamer. And what I saw, I’ll never forget. Mrs. Hamer had been beaten by a trusty—a black trusty—in jail. Mrs. Hamer had been beaten horribly. This was a middle-aged woman being beaten by some black trusty who was made to do that.
One of the stanzas to “We Shall Overcome” goes, “We are not afraid…we are not afraid.” Were you afraid, that summer in the Delta?
Norton: I took steps to keep myself as safe as possible. I didn't just go there wildly. But there was a sense of invulnerability that comes with being young. We believed that being nonviolent would protect us.
When we went back to Jackson for Medgar’s funeral, afterward some of the SNCC people came out of the church and said, “Well, we’re going to march.” We found ourselves facing lines of helmeted Mississippi State Police with their guns drawn. Dorie Ladner, who was a really brave Mississippi girl, began singing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round.” Then we all started marching. We did not believe that they would spray us with bullets. And they didn’t do that. Instead, they waded into the crowd, picked people out, and arrested them. It became a kind of musical chairs. Whoever was still left standing was who didn’t get arrested. But we did not believe that we were in danger of being sprayed with bullets. In fact, the cops never did that. As brutal as they were, that is not what they did. No, they arrested people, and then released them to the Klan—yes. Or they beat them in jail, but they did not—they did not just kill people out in the open. In terms of demonstrations, that was not their way.
But surely you worried about arrest?
Norton: I worried a little about getting a record, because I was going to be a lawyer and that could be held against a lawyer. But we thought no one was going to punish us for having arrest records sitting in against injustice. I believed in American justice enough to believe that nonviolent civil disobedience would not ruin my life.
“As someone [who came] out of the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s rights movement seemed to me the logical next step.”
Those years, that civil disobedience, it’s given me a great deal personally. As I look back on it now, I consider it extremely fortunate that I was able to participate in the great movements of my time. It was good luck that that I could participate in the civil rights struggle, the women’s rights movement, the free South Africa movement. Those movements helped shape my life.
When historians talk about the modern women’s movement, they say that one of the places it began was in the Mississippi Delta, with the female SNCC workers who saw the parallels between the condition of blacks and women. Do you think it’s true?
Norton: In my analysis, yes. As someone [who came] out of the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s rights movement seemed, to me, the logical next step. The analogies were very plain to me. I also knew that the first feminist wave had grown out of the abolitionist movement. So there was that history there, too. I’ve always been proud that the women’s rights movement grew out of the Civil Rights Movement. One of the reasons I so respect Shirley Chisholm [who served as a member of Congress from 1968 to 1982 and ran for president in 1972] is because she understood that she was both black and a woman and that you didn’t have to disown one part of yourself to fight for the other part.
How did you fight for both?
Norton: In the early 1970s, when I served in the administration of Mayor John Lindsay as Human Rights Commissioner, I held the first hearings in the country on discrimination against women. Every famous feminist in the world came to testify! At that hearing, I tried to lay out how the civil rights laws that had been passed in the 1960s applied to women, because I was chagrined that women were filing so few complaints. I’d go to the women’s organizations and say, “What’s wrong with these women? We’ve got to get people more active. These antidiscrimination laws apply to them.”
Same thing a few years later, when I chaired the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the Carter administration. When I came to the EEOC, women were still shy about stepping forward about sexual harassment. That’s why I realized we had to have sexual harassment guidelines that make it easier for women to step forward.
What was it in your life that made you a feminist?
Norton: There were a number of things. That experience with the Root-Tilden scholarship was one. But I was radicalized by the Civil Rights Movement to see its implications for everybody. There may be something personal here, too. I am the oldest of three girls. Feminism may come easier to people who are thrust into leadership by being the firstborn.
But that’s not what made me a feminist. I don’t see how you can be involved in a movement for universal civil rights and human rights and fail to see its implications for everyone.
When some college students hear about the experiences of our generation, they almost can’t believe that there was a time when young people were able to change the world. Do you find the same thing when you meet your young constituents?
Norton: If I had been born in my mother’s generation, I would have been born too early. If I had been born in my son’s generation, and my daughter’s, I would have been born too late. So my own participation in the civil rights struggle, and in the women’s rights movement and the free South Africa movement, all grow from the luck of the moment in time in which I happened to be born. It’s harder for young people today, who have no ready-made great issues begging for young people to lead them. The women’s movement begged for that. Certainly the Civil Rights Movement begged for that.
