[On December
6, 1865, the 13th
Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy
that crucial amendment and four others, leading up to a weekend post on three
potential amendments to come!]
On how the 1961
amendment echoes the city’s complex history, and how it helped shift it.
From its
earliest origins, the federal capital of Washington, DC has had a complex,
contested identity, both within the American government and as a geographic
entity. The capital was created out of both an informal political arrangement
(the Compromise of 1790, in
which Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson agreed that the federal government would
pay all remaining state Revolutionary War debt in exchange for establishing a
national capital in the South) and a couple of subsequent Congressional laws
(the Residence
Act, also of 1790, which formalized a 10-year plan to construct the capital;
and later the Organic
Act of 1801, which officially designated the newly constructed city as part
of the federal government and thus its citizens as part of neither Maryland nor
Virginia). And the political and geographic evolution did not end there: in 1846, for
example, the Virginia General Assembly (fearing that slavery would soon be
abolished in the capital) voted to accept the area known as Alexandria (which
had been incorporated into DC when the capital was officially organized) back
into the state; Congress agreed, and with its July
vote for this “retrocession” changed all those Alexandrians from citizens
of DC (and thus without Congressional representation or electoral votes for
president) to Virginians.
The 23rd
Amendment to the Constitution, which passed Congress in June 1960 and was
ratified in March 1961, culminated more than 70 years of Congressional efforts
to address some of the political inequities captured in my first paragraph’s
final parenthesis. As early as 1890, a proposal was introduced to Congress to
grant DC voting rights in presidential elections; the bill did not pass, but
thanks to the efforts of Washington Evening Star journalist and
editor Theodore Noyes and his Citizens’
Joint Committee on National Representation for the District of Columbia,
activism of behalf of this political change for the capital continued throughout
the 20th century. Yet while the 23rd Amendment did indeed
grant electoral votes to the District, it did not provide Congressional
representation for the city, an issue that remains
contested to this day (as illustrated by DC’s
tongue-in-cheek license plate slogan). Moreover, as of 1961 Washington, DC
still did not have “home rule,” meaning that residents of the city could not
elect their own mayor or city council. Although this had been the case
throughout the city’s complex history, the rapidly increasing
percentage of African American residents during the mid-20th
century made the issue part of the Civil Rights Movement by the 1960s—a
connection brought home vividly and painfully during the April
1968 riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination.
Five years after
those riots and twelve years after the 23rd Amendment was ratified,
Congress finally passed the District
of Columbia Home Rule Act, giving DC residents the ability to elect both a
mayor and a 13-member city council. In 1975, the city elected its first mayor, African
American housing and civil rights leader Walter Washington; to date, seven
of the city’s eight mayors have been African American, with the other, Adrian Fenty (who
served from 2006 to 2010), having a mixed-race heritage. Each of these mayoral
administrations deserves individual attention and analysis, of course; yet
taken as a whole this history represents one of the most consistent and potent
African American presences on the American political landscape. And I believe
it’s fair to say that without the passage of the 23rd Amendment, and
the national attention its ratification campaign brought to the issue of DC’s
political representation and voice, the move toward Home Rule and the
subsequent rise of the city’s African American political establishment might
never have taken place (or at least have had far less visibility and effect).
The 23rd Amendment is likely one of the least-remembered of the 27
current amendments, but its impact shouldn’t be underestimated.
Last
AmendmentStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this Amendment? Others you’d highlight?
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