Norton says D.C. seat not about 'my vote'

By Robert "Rob" Redding Jr.

Publisher

Jan. 10, 2007, 12:45 p.m. - Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton yesterday said her quest to gain voting rights for D.C. residents is not about increasing her stature.

"Throughout this process, I have never referred to the District's vote as my vote or to what the vote would mean to me personally because the vote will not belong to me," she said in a statement to House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi. "I want to cast that vote for the citizens of this city, whom I have had the great privilege of representing, who have fought with me every step of the way, and who have waited interminably for justice."

Some political observers have said Norton, a Democrat and the District's nonvoting congressional delegate, wants the vote only for personal gain.

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Norton and Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, a Virginia Republican, reintroduced the D.C. voting rights act yesterday with Norton dedicating a sizable portion of her statement to the rumors.

"Yet, I cannot deny the personal side of this quest, epitomized by my family of native Washingtonians, my father Coleman Holmes, my grandfather, Richard Holmes, who entered the D.C. Fire Department in 1902 and whose picture hangs in my office, a gift from the D.C. Fire Department, and especially my great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, a slave who walked off a Virginia plantation in the 1850s, made it to Washington, and began our family here," she said.  "I cannot help but think today of this man I never knew, a slave in the District until Lincoln freed the slaves here nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation.  I am mindful of my great grandfather, who came here in a furtive search for freedom itself, not the vote in Congress.  I wonder what a man who lived as a slave in the District, and others like him would think if he could know that his great-granddaughter might be the first to cast the first full vote for the District of Columbia in the House of Representatives.  I hope to have the special honor of casting the vote I have sought for 16 years."

The District stands a good chance of getting a vote in Congress this session along with Utah, a Republican state.

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