On Emancipation Day, DC citizens are still fighting for freedom

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As the District of Columbia, once widely known as “Chocolate City” for its large African-American population, prepares to celebrate the day slaves there were freed, the mayor and other incensed local residents complain they are still in shackles.

Emancipation Day will be observed Saturday in the city of 600,000 in honor of the 3,100 slaves that were freed there on April 16, 1862. But Mayor Vincent Gray and others complain that the observance will be dampened by the fact that the district is still enslaved by what some residents view as the heavy hand of the federal government.

In the ongoing tug-of-war largely between Republicans in Congress and the White House over the federal budget, negotiators have agreed to sacrifice the district’s ability to apply its own funds toward abortions for poor women, and agreed that a private school voucher program will be revived and expanded. For Gray and others, the developments have rubbed salt in a longtime wound over the fact that the district is a city that does not have the support of a state government, that has no votes in Congress and is controlled in part by two Congressional committees made of lawmakers not from D.C.

“It’s kind of ironic that this week we’re celebrating emancipation when we’re not emancipated,” Gray, a Democrat, said in an interview.

The mayor, a Washington-native and former City Council chairman elected in November, along with D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown, council members Yvette Alexander, Tommy Wells and Muriel Bowser, all Democrats, and Michael Brown, an Independent, were among 41 people arrested Monday in a massive protest outside a Senate office building at the U.S. Capitol complex. The gathering was in response to the abortion agreement, reached Friday by President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Gray likened the protest Monday organized by DC Vote, a non-profit in the district devoted to working toward voting rights for the city, to the uprisings that emerged unexpectedly across the Middle East.

“Why should the citizens of the District of Columbia have to be subjected to the Congress making decisions about how we spend our own money locally?” Gray said.

“We have Congressional representatives that would do things in the District of Columbia that they would never do in their own district,” the mayor said, referring to the abortion situation and Congress’ previous history of banning needle exchange in the district (that has been spared this time around in the budget negotiations). “There are more than 20 programs in other places around the country,” Gray said.

But the brouhaha of the last several days is not necessarily a bad thing, the mayor added. If nothing else, the arrests and debate over Washington have revived attention to the district’s battle.

“It’s so easy to become discouraged and feel no likelihood for attention and change, but when I saw Congress folks putting out statements and the president’s spokesperson make a statement, it makes you realize they are paying attention,” he said.

The organization that officially represents Republicans in D.C. is not necessarily against the district winning more rights, but believes it is probably not feasible, said the group’s executive director, Paul Craney.The District of Columbia Republican Committee did support a bill that had languished for years and was sponsored by D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton and Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va. The bill proposed to increase the number of House seats by two to 437, and give the district a voting seat in Congress and an extra seat to Utah, which was shortchanged in the 2001 reapportionment process.

But the bill has never made it to the floor for a vote, Craney said. To push for D.C. statehood would be even more unrealistic given the outcome of the voting rights bill, he said. Statehood would give D.C. voting representation in the U.S. House and Senate.

D.C. has one Congressional representative — Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton — who can vote in committee and draft bills, but not vote on legislation. The district also has two shadow senators and a shadow representative, who also cannot vote in Congress.

Some supporters of more rights for the district said what they find unusual about the current budget battle is that they feel that the Congressional Republicans are, in part, capitulating to the desires of the Tea Party as they press on the largely Democratic city, and yet, one of the principles of the original Boston Tea Party was “No taxation without representation.” The slogan “Taxation Without Representation” has been adopted by those who support Congressional voting rights for D.C. to describe what they view as their current situation., It appears on optional license plates offered by the district’s Department of Motor Vehicles.

“How can you answer the Tea Party’s demands in a budget deal, and violate the demands of the original Tea Party in the 1700s?” asked Matsimela Mapfumo, an activist who protested in favor of D.C. voting rights for many years, and the host of Make It Plain, a progressive current events talk show on Sirius Satellite Radio.

Mapfumo, who moved to New York about a year ago, said he has advised Gray to engage in “sustained civil disobedience” as he and others did when he lived in the district and a coalition of groups staged weekly protests.

“D.C. has to become really a modern-day Selma,” Mapfumo said, referring to the Alabama city where activists and authorities engaged in bloody battle that, ultimately, resulted in the signing of the Voting Rights Act. “That’s what I’ve always advocated for, that’s what I’ve always believed in. This situation is just no longer sustainable.”

Woven through the voting rights debate are issues of race, primarily because the district has traditionally had a majority African-American population. Though the demographics have shifted over the last few decades, Census Bureau data show that the district’s African-American population still holds at 55 percent.

Given this layer in the tensions, some supporters of more rights for D.C. said the budget negotiations have made them feel some sense of betrayal from Obama, the first African-American president.

“As a senator, he was a supporter and a co-sponsor of the D.C. Voting Rights Act and made several positive statements, but once he became president we figured that our best work and our best hope was in front of us,” said Eugene Dewitt Kinlow, public affairs director for DC Vote.

“Through the first year and through careful prodding and messaging, we urged him to step up and the White House was silent,” added Kinlow, who was among the first group of people to be arrested along with the mayor on Monday. “Then, we found out that we went from being treated as a second-class citizen to being at the back of the bus to being thrown under the bus, and that was what made people come together Monday and decide we really just have to show the world that we deserve democracy.”

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has said that Obama is a supporter of “home rule” for the district, but also has said that the budget negotiations involved tough choices and that the president did not get everything he would have liked to have seen.

In the meantime, those in the district angered over the developments say they will keep pushing. Today, Gray is scheduled to take part in a midday protest on Capitol Hill.

“I don’t see how America can deal with this kind of hypocrisy,” the mayor said. “We support the changes in Egypt, we are the world’s conscience when it comes to democracy, except it doesn’t seem to include the nation’s capital.”