Black History Month

BLACK HISTORY MONTH -- (House of Representatives - February 17, 2005)

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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding to me, and I thank him for his leadership in coming forward during this whole month of February when the whole Nation is invited to think about the history of African Americans and about their present effort to obtain first-class citizenship.

I was just at the White House, perhaps last week, it was when the President had a commemoration built around the new African American Museum, approved by the House and the Senate, something that African Americans have been trying to get ever since Civil War soldiers in Washington, D.C. asked for a museum. I want to just say how much I appreciate that the House and the Senate now have agreed that the Congress will pay for 50 percent, and we will raise money, we in the public, Americans of every background, for this museum here in the District of Columbia to commemorate the history, the very long history, a history as long as the history of the Nation itself, of African Americans in our country who were central to building the Nation as we know it, were critical to building its great economic might, and have been late because of the tragic history of our country in claiming the benefits and the rewards that most Americans are used to obtaining within a generation or two of coming to this country.

To the gentleman from New York, from Brooklyn in particular, a very distinguished member of a number committees, the Committee on Government Reform, on which I serve; and especially the Committee on Education and the Workforce, in which his long service has helped in many benefits in education that are remarkably important not only to African Americans but to our country, I say to him that I recognize that we began with a theme about the Niagara Movement.

Some may wonder about the Niagara Movement, which in a real sense started the 20th century movement for equal rights, the forerunner of the NAACP. A number of Washingtonians were at that first call. I just celebrated the life of one of them, Mary Church Terrell, a woman who in her eighties was picketing out in front of public accommodations, yes, here in the Nation's Capital, a southern city which was as segregated as any part of the South, picketing to open ordinary accommodations. This woman was the first member of any Board of Education in the United States; a very distinguished history, and one of only two women who put out the call for African Americans to come from around the country to talk about what they should do as the 20th century dawned to eliminate racism and discrimination in our country.

I want to note the extraordinary two works of Dr. David Levering Lewis, a historian who has won the Pulitzer Prize for his volumes on the life on W.E.B. Du Bois. This is the intellectual father of the civil rights movement, the first black to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University, a man who in many ways was responsible for what remains the intellectual underpinning of black aspiration in America.

This is an extraordinary work. I have just finished Volume 1 and am just beginning Volume 2. He had a very long life, died on the day that the March on Washington gathered here in his late nineties. So no wonder it took two volumes. But it was his remarkable life, a life that in a real sense takes us on a journey of 20th century America for what blacks have encountered and how their effort to obtain equality in our country has proceeded. I recommend it to anyone who is interested not only in serious history but in wonderful writing and in events that in a real sense help us understand a lot of what is happening today. It is extraordinary work, which is why I think it won the Pulitzer Prize in the first place.

The second black to graduate from Harvard with a Ph.D. was one far less well known than W.E.B. Du Bois, whose name is so closely associated with the NAACP. He worked for the NAACP for ``The Crisis,'' their publication, for decades. He was central to its formation.

But less well known is the second black person to graduate from Harvard, Carter G. Woodson. As Dr. Du Bois was the intellectual father of the NAACP and of the Civil Rights Movement, Carter G. Woodson was the man who discovered black history at a time when almost no publisher would even publish works, even serious works like his own, about African American history, and now he is regarded by his peers as one of America's great historians. Carter G. Woodson proceeded right here in the District of Columbia to do his own work in a brownstone located in the historic Shaw area, organizing his own organization, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, which continues to this day; his own presses.

When I was a youngster going to segregated schools in the District of Columbia, there was a Negro history bulletin that came every other week. So he somehow managed to do on-the-ground education of ordinary blacks like us in the schools, and to do some of the most important writing of history, in the professional sense, that has ever been done. He started the whole effort to not rewrite but to write American history.

People have to understand that much of American history as it described African Americans could only be called defamatory. Not only did it not bring out the contributions of African Americans, it defamed African Americans, built in the prejudices and discrimination of the larger society. It took a great intellectual like Carter G. Woodson to begin the process of undoing that.

Now we have Ph.Ds from all the great universities. We see some of them on television telling the story of African American life in the many documentaries, for example, that are being shown.

The gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) mentioned that the Capitol was built by slave labor. I want to reinforce that. The Capitol was built, yes, by slave and free labor, and there were also immigrant labor who contributed to it. But this House and the Senate passed a resolution indicating that we should find some way to take note of the fact that this very place where we now stand, we owe to the labor of free and enslaved blacks. Some of the enslaved blacks were simply brought here to work by their masters. The masters were paid; the slaves were not.

Some, frankly, were runaway slaves. My own great grandfather who came to Washington in the 1850s was a runaway slave. He did not work on the Capitol, but he certainly worked on the streets of D.C., because one could work on the streets. They were building D.C., and they did not ask them who they were unless the master came and found them, and under the Fugitive Slave Law, he could take them back. So that was always a real risk. But working on the Capitol, I am sure those were, as it were, well-documented slaves.

But, Mr. Speaker, until now the legislation which requires a task force to be formed to make sure that this commemoration takes place has not been formed. I know that the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) has sent a letter to the Speaker, simply reminding him of that, because I am sure that that must be an oversight.

But the Visitors Center is about to be completed and the time to take care of this is when we are under construction. If I may express my own opinion, nobody wants, or at least I do not want, a statue of some slave in the Capitol. That is not what we are after. Some kind of tasteful reminder of this place and how it came to be has by statute been mandated, and I simply draw to the attention of both sides of the aisle that we have not done the start-up work to getting the appropriate kind of memorial of some kind built.

I mean, I think of the Vietnam Memorial. Nobody, when they thought there was going to be a Vietnam Memorial, ever envisioned that it would be that wall that now is a virtual place of worship.

It does not have any soldiers on it; it is just a wall with some names on it. In the District of Columbia, we have a Civil War memorial. It is the first memorial to the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who actually served in the Civil War. What it has are a listing of all those names. They served in the Navy and the Army. We got those names by working with Howard University, and there they are.

It is not a wall; it is another kind of an edifice. But it is, by the way, the only one of its kind, the only memorial to African Americans who fought for their own freedom and for one Nation, indivisible, at a time when they were not free, because when you entered the armed services, and talk about some volunteer soldiers, these were real volunteer soldiers, they did not give you your freedom in return. In order to recruit you, they did not say, You serve us, you are free. You were still a slave.

These are men who fought for their country at a time when we were in danger of becoming at least two countries. At the very least, let us begin here in the Capitol by remembering those who were black, some of them not free, who helped build the very place where we meet every week.

Mr. Speaker, I do note that during this African American History Month, Black History Month, we just lost two great Americans, Shirley Chisholm and Ossie Davis. These were one-of-a-kind historic figures; Shirley Chisholm not only because she was first, but she was first in many ways.

She was first in what she was willing to do to break barriers, the first African American woman elected to Congress, the first to run for President of the United States. I was in Florida at her funeral. She will be remembered. Indeed, she will never be forgotten.

She said she did not want to be remembered for being first. Shirley Chisholm understood what was important. She believed that you have to do something in order to be remembered. To many of us, her being the first black woman to come to Congress was doing a whole lot. For her it was not doing a whole lot. But her record in this House is an indication that it was.

But I think we would all do well to remember that before she died she did not even want to be remembered for what she is most likely to be remembered for, and that is being first to have the guts to run for President and being the first to become a Member of the House of Representatives itself.

As a woman, I count myself and the 22 other African American women who have come since as her living legacy. None of us had to encounter what she encountered, which was a House with nobody in it that looked like her. She deserves to be remembered for what she did for our country, for what she did for African Americans.

I do want to say about Ossie Davis, because I am still, as I was when he was alive, awed by his multiple gifts, it is very hard for me to understand people who have more than one gift. Most of us do not have even one. But here is a man who died nearing 90, therefore who lived through the worst days of segregation, and somehow or the other was able to press himself to bring his gifts out.

Those gifts were across the board. Those gifts were the gift of language, his gift as an actor, his gift as a producer, his gift as a leader of the civil rights movement, his gift in letters and in arts, and his gift as a playwright. Heavens, would that any of us, even those who are just being born black, be able to do in their lives as well even one of those things Ossie Davis will be remembered for.

We remember people in Black History Month precisely because they encourage us to do better, because they did it against far greater odds.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, I want to say a word during this shooting war about the role of African Americans in the United States military, because if there is any moment to remember them and if there is any time to remember those who now serve, it is now.

I have just come from a hearing this morning on the treatment of the National Guard and Reserve when it comes to their health care. My congratulations to the chairman of the committee who called the hearing, the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Tom Davis), the chairman of the Committee on Government Reform. This is not the first hearing he has had on this matter.

Mr. Speaker, the hearing was called because members of the National Guard and Reserve have complained about being treated as, for lack of a better word, I will call it second-class soldiers. They are not regularly enlisted soldiers. They are soldiers who are citizen soldiers, called forward in numbers we have never seen before. Almost 50 percent of the troops in Iraq are National Guard and Reserve.

When they are injured, they are not treated as enlisted people are treated. They are sent and held at medical hold companies, and these are scandalously underserved companies where they could not get medical treatment. The hearings have helped to focus on this and provide some improvements.

But what made me think of them to today is the history of disproportionate service by African Americans in the armed services of the United States ever since the war that created our country, the Revolutionary War. This urge to serve, often, perhaps most often, as volunteers, it does seem to me we should note during this Black History Month.

Dr. David Lewis in his volume begins to describe African Americans coming back after World War I. After you fought that kind of war, World War I, you kind of get your gumption, and even though the majority of African Americans lived in the South, we do note that that is when you had the great decade of lynchings, because so many of these African American soldiers came back, particularly to the South in the United States, and assumed that they should act like first-class citizens.

It was perhaps the most shameful decade of our country, and certainly the treatment of these World War I veterans was perhaps the most shameful chapter in American history because of the upsurge of lynchings, many of them men just released from a war that is still very much debated, World War I, where people still try to find out why we were there, why did it happen. It resulted in all the aftermath. Woodrow Wilson tried to make sure, though, that such a war never happened again, and World War II was brought about in part because of the failings of World War I.

I want to note the extraordinary over-representation of blacks in the Reserve and National Guard. Many of them, like so many volunteers in the Army today, are there first to serve their country, and, secondly, because they do not have the same economic rights that my son, that your son and your children have, and service in the volunteer Army is a way to go to college, a way to get a job. Any treatment of them other than first-class treatment in a war like this, a very controversial war, is very much to be criticized until we do much better.

Finally, Mr. Speaker, may I say that among those who are serving in this war are young men and women from the District of Columbia, the same as those who have served our country in every war since the Revolutionary War, and, if I may say so, very specifically in disproportionate numbers. For example, in the Vietnam War the District lost more men than did 10 States, and yet this is a city.

I have gone to a number of funerals; I have gone to Arlington National Cemetery. And just as the first from the District of Columbia served without a vote, so today not only do my constituents serve their country without a vote. They pay taxes, second per capita in the United States, without a vote.

That is bad enough, Mr. Speaker. But on top of that, to go to war without a vote, where your Member cannot vote one way or the other, and yet you volunteer for war, it seems to me that that ought to call to question whether or not the people of the District of Columbia ought to have equal representation in the Congress of the United States.

There is a young man working in my office, his name is Emory Kosh, and he spent a year on the front lines in Iraq. When he came back, somebody told him I was looking for staff assistants. He came and I was pleased to hire him. I must tell you, I congratulate the armed services and I congratulate his parents, because he has been such an excellent worker.

The armed services has done a great deal for African Americans because it was the best and continues to be the best equal employment opportunity employer in the United States.

But this young man stepped forward just as the Congress opened with two of his buddies from the District of Columbia who had graduated from high school here, and they asked for a meeting with the gentleman from Illinois (Speaker Hastert) and our leader, the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi), simply to ask for the return of the vote in the Committee of the Whole to the District, a vote that I won in the 103rd Congress and which was taken back from me when the Congress changed hands.

They came to say, if I may paraphrase them, it would be a first step toward voting rights, and they came because they were about to see what we saw January 30, with the people of Iraq getting the very voting rights in their parliament that these three young men, who were just back from Iraq, did not have.

So they used the occasion to remind the Congress that they were proud to serve, they would serve again, they were volunteers, but that our country had an obligation to them and their families and that was to allow them the same representation, the same equality in the Congress that interestingly they felt they had in the armed forces of the United States.

Mr. Speaker, I draw that to your attention during Black History Month because I want my colleagues to understand that not all of this is history. In the District of Columbia now I am talking about a majority black population, about 60/40 black. But for 150 years the majority here was white. It is because the Congress of the United States has exercised an undemocratic proprietary sense of this city to intervene into its local affairs and to deny the citizens of this city the same rights that you insist upon for your citizens.

Remember that during Black History Month. Remember that black people in the District of Columbia, white people in the District of Columbia, anybody in the District of Columbia, because they live in the capital of their country, the proud capital of their country, are least proud of not having the same rights, particularly when Emory Kosh and other young men and women find themselves this very day in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all over the world serving their country in our name.

It is not history, Mr. Speaker, it is here and now; and we must take action here and now to make it history, to make it yesterday, just as slavery was yesterday, just as Jim Crow in the Nation's Capital was yesterday, just as the segregated schools I went to in the Nation's Capital were yesterday.

Let us make unequal representation in the Congress of the United States yesterday, make it history, for black, white, Hispanic and people of every background who live in the District of Columbia, who live in their Nation's Capital.

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