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Meet Eleanor Holmes Norton. She is a Delegate to Congress representing the District of Columbia. Read her biography and see photos and a video of her below.

It was barely a month ago when the U.S. Supreme Court declared a Washington, D.C. handgun ban unconstitutional and overturned the law. Gun registration in the capital city is a week old and Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) is calling on all residents to refuse to buy into the gun culture by just saying no to guns in DC. In fact, efforts by the D.C. City Council to get around the SCOTUS ruling are going on even as we speak. Unbelievable.

A local resident, Dick Heller, who was the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that overturned Washington's strict 32-year-old handgun ban, announced his candidacy, challenging Delegate Holmes for her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is running as a Libertarian of course.

Eleanor Holmes Norton was born in Washington D.C. on June 13, 1937 so her age is 71. She attended Antioch College and Yale Law School receiving her law degree 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. By the time Norton 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 like Medgar Evers.

Her time with SNCC inspired her lifelong commitment to social activism and early feminism. In the early 1970s, Eleanor Holmes Norton was a signer of the Black Woman’s Manifesto, a classic document of the Black feminist movement.

In the early 1970s, 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.

As the President Carter appointed first female Chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Norton released the EEOC's first set of regulations outlining what constituted sexual harassment and declaring that sexual harassment was indeed a form of sexual discrimination that violated federal civil rights laws.

Norton was elected in 1990 as a Democratic delegate for Washington D.C. to the House of Representatives, taking office on January 3, 1991. Delegates - as opposed to Representatives - to Congress are entitled to sit in the House of Representatives and vote in committee but are not allowed to take part in legislative floor votes.

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