Eleanor Holmes Norton

Eleanor Holmes Norton has served as the delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives for the District of Columbia since 1990.

Born June 13, 1937, Norton is a third-generation Washingtonian. After receiving her bachelor's degree from Antioch College in Ohio in 1960, she simultaneously earned a master's degree (1963) and her law degree in American studies (1964) from Yale University.

While in college and graduate school, she was active in the civil rights movement and an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and was arrested for organizing and participating in sit-ins in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Ohio. She participated in the Mississippi Freedom Summer, working with civil rights leaders. After law school, she was a law clerk to Federal District Court Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. She was the assistant legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1965 to 1970. She specialized in freedom of speech cases, and in 1968 won a Supreme Court case on behalf of the National States' Rights Party. In 1970, she successfully represented sixty female employees of Newsweek who filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that Newsweek had a policy of only allowing men to be reporters. In 1977, she was appointed her to serve as the first woman to chair the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by President Jimmy Carter. She became a professor at Georgetown University Law Center in 1982, and is still a tenured professor of law there.

For information on Norton's policy subject areas, committee appointments and sponsored/co-sponsored legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives, please visit her profile on https://www.congress.gov.

Sources:

Ballotpedia (n.d.). Eleanor Holmes Norton. Retrieved on November 21 2022, from https://ballotpedia.org/Eleanor_Holmes_Norton