Movement for Voting Rights Gains Ground, Loses Interest

Some say D.C. residents have gotten just enough democracy to dull their concern.

"We don't feel the oppression in the way we once did," said Sterling Tucker, a former D.C. Council chairman and leader in the constitutional amendment fight. He was referring to the days before the 1973 Home Rule Act, when a few white congressmen basically ran the majority-black District, and residents couldn't even choose their mayor.

Indeed, the District now has such a high-profile congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), that some residents mistakenly think she is a full congresswoman, activists say. She can vote in committee but can't rise to powerful positions such as committee chairwoman. She lacks members' main source of power: a vote to pass or defeat legislation.

The current voting rights bill reflects a more gradual approach than earlier battles. It does not give the District voting rights in the Senate or make it a state. Some say that incremental approach has dampened enthusiasm for the bill.

"The issue comes down to a vote for Eleanor Holmes Norton versus an issue of full representation," said the Rev. Graylan Hagler, a longtime activist from Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ, a prominent black church in Northeast. "The question is whether people want a half a loaf or a full loaf."

In the past, Norton had supported full D.C. voting rights. But last year, she threw her support behind a bill sponsored by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) that would provide just the D.C. and Utah House seats. Norton says the District should take what it can get at this point, while keeping fuller representation as an eventual goal. Even a single House vote could strengthen the city's hand in deflecting unwanted congressional interference in its affairs, the bill's supporters say.

That approach has won over much of the local political elite, including Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and the D.C. Council.

It also has been embraced by an advocacy group, DC Vote, which longtime voting rights supporters credit with running a more professional campaign than the grass-roots efforts of the past.

DC Vote, which grew out of a 1998 voting rights lawsuit, has signed up about 70 organizations as partners, ranging from the Washington Teachers Union to the D.C. Chamber of Commerce. It does full-time lobbying and educational work, backed by a million-dollar budget financed largely by local foundations. DC Vote recently attracted several hundred volunteers to Capitol Hill to press for the bill. Its director, a former Clinton administration official named Ilir Zherka, argues that the lack of street mobilization is not that important. Most of the city's past victories in gaining self-governance were the result of high-level politicking, not local grass-roots organizing, he said.

"All those efforts were very much like ours now," he said.

Mike Beard, an activist in the 1970s, said the new movement "is much more politically astute than we were in those days," when vote supporters would gather to toss tea bags in the Tidal Basin.

"We thought, if we could just present the idea, and people knew you didn't have the right to vote in the District of Columbia -- oh, sure, that will happen," Beard recalled.

In the end, he said, "The politics of it was too hard to overcome."