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Eleanor Holmes Norton
Eleanor Holmes Norton (born June 13, 1937) is an American politician, lawyer, and human rights activist. Norton is a congressional delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives, where she has represented the District of Columbia since 1991 as a member of the Democratic Party. She is serving her eighteenth term in the United States House of Representatives.
Prior to serving in Congress, Norton organized for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement. From 1977 to 1981, she was the first female chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Norton will not seek re-election to the House of Representatives in 2026.
Norton was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Vela (née Lynch), a schoolteacher, and Coleman Holmes, a civil servant. She attended Dunbar High School—a school famous for educating black children—as a member of its last segregated class. She was elected the junior class president and graduated as a member of the National Honor Society. After high school, she attended Antioch College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1960, then Yale University, where she received a Master of Arts in American studies in 1963, then graduated with a Bachelor of Laws from Yale Law School in 1964.
While in college and graduate school, Norton was active in the civil rights movement and an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). By the time she graduated from Antioch, she 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 such as Medgar Evers. Her first encounter with a recently released but physically beaten Fannie Lou Hamer forced her to bear witness to the intensity of violence and Jim Crow repression in the South.
Norton's time in the SNCC inspired her lifelong commitment to social activism and feminism. She contributed the piece "For Sadie and Maud" to the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan. Norton was on the founding advisory board of the Women's Rights Law Reporter (founded 1970), the first legal periodical in the United States to focus exclusively on the field of women's rights law. In the early 1970s, Norton was a signer of the Black Woman's Manifesto, a classic document of the Black feminist movement.
Upon graduation from law school, she worked as a law clerk to Federal District Court Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. In 1965, she became the assistant legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, a position she held until 1970. In 1970, Norton represented sixty female employees of Newsweek who had filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that Newsweek had a policy of allowing only men to be reporters. The women won, and Newsweek agreed to allow women to be reporters.
Norton specialized in freedom of speech cases, and her work included successfully arguing Carroll v. President & Commissioners of Princess Anne, a Supreme Court case brought on behalf of the white supremacist National States' Rights Party. She put this victory into perspective in an interview with one of the District of Columbia Bar's website editors: "I defended the First Amendment, and you seldom get to defend the First Amendment by defending people you like ... You don't know whether the First Amendment is alive and well until it is tested by people with despicable ideas. And I loved the idea of looking a racist in the face—remember this was a time when racism was much more alive and well than it is today—and saying, 'I am your lawyer, sir, what are you going to do about that?'" She worked as an adjunct assistant professor at New York University Law School from 1970 to 1971. In 1970, 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 feminists from throughout the country came to New York City to testify, while Norton 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.
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Eleanor Holmes Norton
Eleanor Holmes Norton (born June 13, 1937) is an American politician, lawyer, and human rights activist. Norton is a congressional delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives, where she has represented the District of Columbia since 1991 as a member of the Democratic Party. She is serving her eighteenth term in the United States House of Representatives.
Prior to serving in Congress, Norton organized for Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement. From 1977 to 1981, she was the first female chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Norton will not seek re-election to the House of Representatives in 2026.
Norton was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Vela (née Lynch), a schoolteacher, and Coleman Holmes, a civil servant. She attended Dunbar High School—a school famous for educating black children—as a member of its last segregated class. She was elected the junior class president and graduated as a member of the National Honor Society. After high school, she attended Antioch College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1960, then Yale University, where she received a Master of Arts in American studies in 1963, then graduated with a Bachelor of Laws from Yale Law School in 1964.
While in college and graduate school, Norton was active in the civil rights movement and an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). By the time she graduated from Antioch, she 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 such as Medgar Evers. Her first encounter with a recently released but physically beaten Fannie Lou Hamer forced her to bear witness to the intensity of violence and Jim Crow repression in the South.
Norton's time in the SNCC inspired her lifelong commitment to social activism and feminism. She contributed the piece "For Sadie and Maud" to the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan. Norton was on the founding advisory board of the Women's Rights Law Reporter (founded 1970), the first legal periodical in the United States to focus exclusively on the field of women's rights law. In the early 1970s, Norton was a signer of the Black Woman's Manifesto, a classic document of the Black feminist movement.
Upon graduation from law school, she worked as a law clerk to Federal District Court Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. In 1965, she became the assistant legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, a position she held until 1970. In 1970, Norton represented sixty female employees of Newsweek who had filed a claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that Newsweek had a policy of allowing only men to be reporters. The women won, and Newsweek agreed to allow women to be reporters.
Norton specialized in freedom of speech cases, and her work included successfully arguing Carroll v. President & Commissioners of Princess Anne, a Supreme Court case brought on behalf of the white supremacist National States' Rights Party. She put this victory into perspective in an interview with one of the District of Columbia Bar's website editors: "I defended the First Amendment, and you seldom get to defend the First Amendment by defending people you like ... You don't know whether the First Amendment is alive and well until it is tested by people with despicable ideas. And I loved the idea of looking a racist in the face—remember this was a time when racism was much more alive and well than it is today—and saying, 'I am your lawyer, sir, what are you going to do about that?'" She worked as an adjunct assistant professor at New York University Law School from 1970 to 1971. In 1970, 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 feminists from throughout the country came to New York City to testify, while Norton 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.