Eleanor Holmes Norton

Eleanor Holmes Norton was born on June 13, 1937 in Washington, D.C. to a school‑teacher mother, Vela Lynch, and a civil‑servant father, Coleman Holmes. She grew up in the historic Dunbar High School, graduating as class president and a member of the National Honor Society before attending Antioch College, where she earned a B.A. in 1960. She continued her studies at Yale University, receiving an M.A. in American studies in 1963 and a Bachelor of Laws from Yale Law School in 1964. While at Antioch and Yale she became deeply involved in the civil‑rights movement, organizing sit‑ins across the nation and working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, where she witnessed the brutal repression of activists like Fannie Lou Hamer. These formative experiences forged a lifelong commitment to social justice, feminism, and human‑rights advocacy, later reflected in her contributions to seminal feminist anthologies and the founding of the Women’s Rights Law Reporter.

Her professional career launched with a clerkship for Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, followed by a pivotal role as assistant legal director of the ACLU (1965‑1970). Norton’s landmark litigation for gender equality at Newsweek and her defense of First‑Amendment rights for extremist groups highlighted her principled approach to the law. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter appointed her the first female chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where she authored the agency’s inaugural sexual‑harassment regulations. After serving as a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and teaching at Georgetown Law, she entered electoral politics, winning the Democratic delegate seat for the District of Columbia in 1990 and beginning a historic tenure in the U.S. House of Representatives on January 3 1991. Throughout her eighteen‑plus terms she has championed D.C. statehood, nuclear disarmament, and progressive legislation, while remaining an active member of the Congressional Progressive and Black Caucuses. Her personal life includes a marriage to Edward Norton (1965‑1993) and two children, John and Katherine, the latter of whom has Down syndrome.