"Eleanor Holmes Norton"(June 13,1937)

Is a Delegate to Congress representing the District of Columbia.In her position she is able to serve on and vote with committees,as well as speak from the House floor.However,she is not permitted to vote on final passage of any legislation because she is not a full member of Congress.Eleanor was born in Washington,D.C. to Coleman Holmes,a civil servant,and Velma Holmes schoolteacher.She attended Antioch College(B.A. 1960),Yale University (M.A. 1963) and Yale Law School (L.L.B 1964).While in college and graduate school,Eleanor was active in the civil rights movement and an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.By the time she graduated from Antioch,Eleanor had already been arrested for organizing and participating in sit-ins in Washington, D.C.,Maryland,and Ohio.While in law school,she traveled to Mississippi for the Mississippi Freedom Summer and worked with civil rights stalwarts like Medgar Evers.Eleanor first encounter with a recently released but physically beaten Fannie Lou Hamner forced her to bear witness to the intensity of violence and Jim Crow repression in the South.Her time with SNCC inspired her lifelong commitment to social activism and her budding sense of feminism.In the early 1970s,she was a signer of the Black Woman's Manifesto a classic document of the Black feminist movement.Upon graduation from law school,she became a law clerk to Federal District Court Judge A.Leon Higginbotham Jr.At the end of her clerkship,Eleanor later served as assistant legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union,adjunct assistant professor at New York University Law School,executive to the Mayor of New York.In the early 1970s,Mayor John Lindsay appointed her as the head of the New York City Human Rights Commission and she held the first hearings in the country on discrimination against women.Prominent feminist from throughout the country came to New York City to testify,while Eleanor used the platform as a means of raising public awareness about the application of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to women and sex discrimination.Appointed by President Jimmy Carter as the first woman chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,she released the EEOC'S first set of regulations outlining what constituted sexual harassment and declaring  that sexual harassment was indeed a form of sexual discrimination that violated federal civil rights laws.She also served as a senior fellow of the Urban Institute and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center.Eleanor was one of the founders of the Women's Rights Law Law Reporter,the first legal periodical to focus exclusively on Women's rights.She received a Foremother Award for her Lifetime of accomplishments from the National Research Center for Women & Families in 2011.Eleanor was was elected in 1990 as a Democratic delegate to the House of Representatives,defeating city council member Betty Ann Kane in the primary despite the last-minute revelation that Eleanor and her husband (both lawyers)had failed to file D.C. income tax returns 1982 and 1989.As reported in The Washington Post,this issue was resolved when she and her husband paid over $80,000 in back taxes and fines.Her campaign manager was Donna Brazile.The delegate position was open because Del. Walter Fauntroy was running for mayor rather than seeking reelection.Eleanor took office on January 3,1991,and has been reelected every two years since.She is up for reelection in November 2012.Legislation strongly supported by Eleanor that would grant the District of Columbia a voting representative in the House,the District of Columbia Voting Rights Act of 2009,was passed by the United States on February 26,2009.However the legislation staled in the House and failed to to pass prior to the end of the 111th Congress.The legislation proposed in 2009 did not grant her the right to vote in the 111th Congress, as she would have had to remain in her elected office of delegate for the duration of her two-year term.She is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.