Testimony at the City Council’s Hearing on
Statehood and Self-Determination
May 13, 2009
Samuel Jordan
Thank you and good afternoon. I am Samuel Jordan, former Chair of the
DC Statehood party. If politics is the competition for the control of
resources and the decisions that govern their allocation, then the purpose
of the right to vote, is to put social resources under the control of the
enfranchised.
With this view, the struggle for the franchise has always cost, in
ascending order of intensity and mass engagement: civil appeal, assertive
negotiation, agitation, opposition, protest, and finally rebellion.
Through its history, residents of the District of Columbia have
matriculated through each of these stages in the campaign for
self-government. Nevertheless, we can say that the campaign is not
concluded. Furthermore, we can also say that this order of intensity has
engaged District residents historically in a descending order of class
position. That is, the more genteel visits to Members of Congress to
politely discuss the benefits of the franchise for DC residents have
occurred early in DC history and were conducted by Washington’s elite
who were close, if not identical, in race and class position to the
Members of Congress they solicited. They were often neighbors.
Whereas, following the assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther
King, Jr., the rebellion in the streets, involved greater numbers of
Washington’s poor and dispossessed as recorded in the arrest documents
through the days of disruption. It is also clear that the most rapid
improvement in the District’s status and enjoyment of the franchise came
within a relatively brief period subsequent to the events of that tragic
April day in 1968.
The period 1961 to 1973, referred to in today’s hearing agenda as the
Civil Rights Era in the campaign for suffrage in the District, had
important preparatory developments. Among them are the organization of the
New Negro Alliance in 1933, which sought employment of African Americans
in white businesses in their neighborhoods; the Hamburger Grill “Don’t
buy where you can’t work” campaign, whose leaders included Walter E.
Washington, our first Mayor; and the Thompson Restaurant desegregation
campaign, led by Anne Stein and the inestimable Mary Church Terrell in
1949 to 1953. That period also saw the integration of the old Uline Arena
through mass, District-wide agitation. These victories stand out in their
perfection of the rallies, mass mailings, sit-in, picketing, and selective
patronage tactics that were used throughout the Civil Rights Era in
varying combinations, as dictated by the nature of the targeted
discrimination against African Americans.
This era began with a 1960 national suffrage bill, the Keating-Randolph
amendment to a proposed constitutional amendment that would also end the
poll tax and give governors the authority to appoint members of their
state congressional delegations in the event of nuclear attack, a proposal
of Sen. Kefauver of Tennessee. The original three-part amendment was
reduced to a proposal to grant the residents of the District the right to
vote for President and Vice President and fixed the electoral college
complement at three — equal to that of the smallest state. It passed
Congress in June 1960, and was ratified by the states by March 1961. The
23rd amendment’s promoters assured their own constituents and a national
audience that, as Sen. Keating expressed it, “this is a right to vote
amendment, not a self-government amendment.” The new amendment was one
of seventy separate national suffrage measures between 1960 and 1877, but
the only one that reached the voting stage in Congress. It is the opinion
of many that a national suffrage proposal was an attention-diverting
substitute for the campaign for local autonomy.
Categorical rejection of enfranchisement and self-government for
District residents, particularly the District’s African American
residents, according to contemporary accounts, characterized the
thirty-one-year tenure of South Carolina’s John McMillan, the Dixiecrat
Chairman of the House District Committee (including twenty-seven
consecutive years, 1955-1972).
Upon the inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1961, the District
was offered an elected Mayor and Council, with tax authority, a nonvoting
Delegate in the House of Representatives, and a stable federal payment
formula. Congress and the President would retain ultimate legislative and
veto authority. Ironically, this was referred to as the “whole loaf”
proposal. His predecessor, President Eisenhower, offered a territorial
form of government with a governor appointed by the president and a
fifteen-member legislature elected by the residents of the city with the
retention of Congressional and presidential review/rejection authority —
the “half loaf” plan.
Kennedy’s proposals, the product of his support for some form of Home
Rule for the District since his earliest days in the House of
Representatives, were among a series of proposals that, although supported
by a significant number of Senators and Representatives, continued to
dismiss the wishes of the majority of the District’s residents for full,
local self-government.
It was this demand that shaped the agenda of District chapters of
national civil rights organizations and local associations entering the
fight for Negro suffrage in Washington, DC and elsewhere in a new national
atmosphere conditioned by the growing successes of the civil rights
movement, particularly in the south, where the campaign for suffrage and
its victories were headline-grabbing and dramatic.
The March on Washington in 1963 brought those primarily southern
campaigns and their activist leadership to Washington, forming a base of
support and training in tactics and organization for local civil rights
leaders. SNCC, CORE, SCLC, and the NAACP were among the most important
national organizations that assessed the state of the Negro in Washington,
DC, and committed resources, human and material, to the development of a
long-term, local effort to win the right to vote and self-government. “Free
DC” was a demand of the 1963 march.
While national and local civil rights organizations sought greater
autonomy for DC residents, their support for the full franchise varied
according to their mandates derived from the characteristics of their
constituent membership and their own movement portfolios. The more
conservative organizations including the Urban League and the NAACP,
promoted step-by-step, limited Home Rule, while the Black United Front,
SNCC, and the DC Statehood Party, considered more “progressive”
organizations, supported immediate and full self-government.
The demand for national representation, for Home Rule, and for
statehood were in many ways quite distinct; nevertheless, the constant
cross-pollination of personnel and mutual support for the long-term goal
of self-government tended to minimize the divisions among the
organizations. As a result, Rev. David Eaton, the President of the Black
United Front, was also active in the several statehood committees and
supported the Emergency Committee for the Transportation Crisis, the ECTC.
Julius Hobson was a member of the Black United Front and the leader of DC
CORE, and later a co-founder of the DC Statehood Party. In each
organization, members of CORE, SNCC, the Urban League, the NAACP, the DC
Congress of PTAs, and labor representatives responded to calls for action
on the picket lines, community forums, and neighborhood door-to-door
leafleting projects. These organizations, for all their differences, were
in great agreement on goals even when tactics were disputed.
While a mere chronology of the period 1961 to 1973 would serve neither
the purpose nor format of this hearing, it is valuable to emphasize
several developments that helped to give more concrete form to the nature
of DC activism that cemented the demand for self-government in a
broadening base of local support.
Passage of the 23rd amendment taught DC residents and activists that
there was sympathy for the democratic principle in the nation at large if
we would only reach outside our borders. Within the city, however, there
were several seminal events that contributed substantially to the
long-term capacity for base building and mass activism. We might site
these events: 1) The 1966 boycott of DC Transit Company, led by SNCC and
Marion Barry, was and still is the largest effective example of mass
action protest of local conditions in Washington, DC. On a daily basis,
for about three days, over 150,000 people organized alternative transit to
and from workplaces and commercial centers on the model of the Montgomery
bus boycott. DC Transit, in defeat, altered its fare rate policies and
strengthened its hiring program for African American drivers and garage
mechanics. 2) The ECTC was a multi-racial, intergenerational,
environmental, transportation, and housing campaign, which stopped the
construction of super highways through the city under the slogan, “No
white man’s highways through a black man’s home.” Not only did they
win, but they also demonstrated by example that black and white Washington
could implement a strategy that involved suburbanites in a victory for the
long-term future of city planning and regional economic cooperation and
development. The ECTC victory led to the DC MetroRail system and the
abandonment of plans to criss-cross the city with freeways. Maryland and
Virginia stayed with the highway lobby and lament to this day the absence
of a modern, underground urban rail transit system. The members of ECTC
became the organizing core of the DC Statehood Party.
3) Rebellion, the last option in the social protest calculus, was
triggered by the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., on
April 4, 1968. It was followed in less than three weeks, on April 22, by
the approval of an elected school board. A non-voting Delegate in the
House of Representatives was seated in 1971, and the passage of the Home
Rule Charter in 1973, established an elected Mayor, Council, and ANC
system. Twenty thousand people participated, thirty new fires were set per
hour, twelve hundred buildings were burned, seven thousand six hundred
people were arrested, and five thousand jobs were lost permanently.
Smoldering discontent and resentment of race domination exploded into
flames and a century of agitation for Home Rule was compressed into a
period of five years.
The work of this Committee, Mr. Chairman, provides an opportunity for
the Council of the District to take the lead in setting the compass for
future gains by the people of the District toward the goal of full
self-government. A review of the period 1961-1973, when recounted in much
greater detail than permitted by time limitations for the panelists,
recommends: 1) Clarity in message and mission. In the same manner that
Home Rule differed from national representation and statehood, so does
statehood differ from the DC House Voting Rights initiative. They are to
be distinguished in tactic and vision for the city. Such clarity in
mission and message requires consensus among elected representatives. 2)
The residents of the city must have a grounding in the history, issues,
and methods of successful organizing as taught by a commission or other
organizational grouping that would reach into each community in the city’s
eight wards. This commission or grouping will take its lead from the
Council. 3) As in the campaign for national suffrage for the 23rd
amendment, a national and international campaign must be designed with
sufficient material and fiscal resources committed by the Council in the
first instance and supported through solicitations from all residents of
the District.
Mr. Chairman, in preparing my remarks, I did not intend to devote a
significant amount of attention to Representative John McMillan of South
Carolina, who ruled the District for a total thirty-one years until he was
ousted in 1972, the result of a campaign organized by Rev. Walter E.
Fauntroy with busloads of activists who traveled to McMillan’s district
in South Carolina. In that year, Representative Charles Diggs of Michigan
became the Chairman of the House District Committee. McMillan was the
villain of the piece.
With your permission, I’d like to put on the record an item that
explains my disdain for speaking more about Mr. McMillan. On January 3,
1867, Congress enacted a law that extended the franchise to “all persons
who have resided in the District one year, without regard to race, color
or property holdings.” Justifying his veto of the law giving blacks the
right to vote, President Andrew Johnson said, “It is within their power
to come into the District in such numbers as to have supreme control of
the white race and to govern them by their own officers and by the
exercise of all municipal authority.” McMillan had roots.