“Self-government died early in the District,” note historians Christopher Asch and G. Derek Musgrove. “Not even a generation after Americans went to war to protest ‘no taxation without representation,’ Congress stripped Washingtonians of democracy’s basic unit of currency, the...

“Self-government died early in the District,” note historians Christopher Asch and G. Derek Musgrove. “Not even a generation after Americans went to war to protest ‘no taxation without representation,’ Congress stripped Washingtonians of democracy’s basic unit of currency, the right to vote.”[1] As they demonstrate in their 2017 work Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital, during the 1870s, a series of congressional decisions robbed Washingtonians of local and federal representation. December 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of Home Rule, a notable milestone in the city’s history, which reinstated the city’s ability to elect a mayor and city council.  The half century of home rule remains a milestone, if an ambivalent one: the 1973 act created a space for Black culture and political leadership, but it was always limited. Congress retains control over many aspects of the capital’s governance and the law prohibited the use of a commuter tax.

Recently, on November 30, 2023, the Library of Congress (LC) dedicated an entire evening of programming to the topic with a panel consisting of local journalism legends Kojo Nnamdi and Tom Sherwood, SNCC activist, documentarian, and co-founder of The Drum and Spear Book Store (at the time the largest independent Black nationalist bookstore in the country), Judy Richardson, and historians G. Derek Musgrove and Kyla Sommers. Additionally, the LC has on exhibit a two-case display dedicated to Home Rule, which can be viewed on the second floor of the Jefferson building from December 5 until February 2, 2024. Using many of the items on display at the LC and others from collections from the Library’s Manuscript Division, it seems a good time to trace the longer history of Home Rule and the role that race played throughout its historical trajectory.

The 19th Century

To be fair, it’s not as if Washingtonians never voted before 1973. Congress began debating the city’s governance in 1800 and passed the Organic law in 1801, which consolidated Congress’s control over the city, placing Washington City, Georgetown, and Alexandria under the legislature and the president.[2]

Complaints by locals led to the incorporation of Washington City and the formation of a municipal government with a mayor appointed by the president and an elected city council. Eventually, electoral reforms extended to residents the ability to elect the mayor. Together, the elected city council and mayor presided over municipal affairs until 1870, when Congress consolidated the government based on the territorial model governing Western territories. While Washingtonians continued to elect some officials, most were handled through federal appointments, and while the District did enjoy a non-voting delegate to Congress from 1871-1874, residents were otherwise stripped of any ability to govern themselves in 1874, when Congress imposed appointed commissioner rule on the city, making it permanent in 1878. Black residents across classes vociferously opposed the change, seeing it as a direct attempt to undermine their newly established rights: “The old fogies are opposed to Negro suffrage; and as they cannot withdraw it, they seek to diminish if not destroy the opportunities for its exercise,” noted the weekly Black Washington, DC, newspaper, The New Era. [3]

The Washington Board of Trade (BOT), formed in the fall of 1889, accepted the city’s disenfranchisement and chose to focus on economic growth and “preserving the federal government’s financial support of the city.”[4] The BOT soon drew more influence than the commissioners governing the city, and in less than a decade, membership in the BOT became a requirement for anyone hoping to hold a commissioner post.[5] Moreover, the BOT was the organization most responsible for establishing and maintaining segregation in DC.[6] The BOT wrote reports, testified to Congress, and lobbied both commissioners and members of Congress to the extent that it became, as one member noted, “practically a state legislature, city council, and chamber of commerce combined into one.”[7]

Some observers viewed the arrangement positively. “By law, the system is a benevolent despotism; in practice, it is a representative aristocracy,” wrote political scientist C. Meriwether. Elite Washingtonians, as represented by the Washington Evening Star newspaper, characterized the city governance as “the best governed municipality not only in this country but in the world.” Commissioners, the argument went, were honest brokers because they limited the number of obligations that might conflict with public duty.[8]

Yet, the reality is that the post-1870 government structure purposely marginalized residents, especially its growing African American population. The city’s importance as an enclave for Black Americans, particularly during and after the Civil War, and the white supremacy backlash fueled by Reconstruction’s attempt to protect the rights of freedmen and women influenced its retreat from self-government. Later, white residents argued the elected municipal government had sunk the city into debt, just one reason they gave as to why they so feared Black rule. The truth, however, had very little to do with Black residents and much more to do with an overzealous, white-led, Reconstruction-era municipal government narrowly focused on economic development and beautification at the expense of taxpayers.

The Early 20th Century

Racial politics aside, many white Washingtonians regarded their lack of representation as an afront. In 1908, Theodore Noyes inherited the editorship of the Evening Star from his father, Crosby. A longtime proponent of economic development and beautification in the District, Noyes saw value in the city having a voting member in Congress. Without such, residents were “defective and delinquent Americans” and could expect little more than minimal congressional support.  

A desire for more control grew as a result of the federal government’s failure to meet its fiscal obligations to the city. Described as a “half and half” plan, during the nineteenth century, citizens had agreed to give up suffrage for financial security; the federal government promised to pay half of DC’s annual budget. By the late 1930s, the federal government was paying less than 15 percent of the municipal budget. With this in mind, Noyes formed the Citizens’ Joint Committee on National Representation for the District of Columbia (JCNRDC), which appealed for representation in Congress and voting in presidential elections, driving “the suffrage movement for the next two decades.”[9]

With the Star’s support, other white organizations came out in favor of the suffrage movement including the “voteless” League of Women Voters, the Federation of Citizens Associations, and the Board of Trade. In April 1938, an unofficial referendum was held, drawing nearly 100,000 voters. Black and white Washingtonians alike endorsed suffrage, though the former supported it at 95 percent compared to the latter at 80 percent. Unsurprisingly, the racial divide persisted, as most Black Washingtonians supported both congressional representation and home rule, but privileged the latter. Many white voters supported home rule as well, but elites like Noyes and the BOT opposed it. The Federation of Citizen Associations felt similarly. “An umbrella organization” notes historian Lauren Pearlman, the FCA “used the defense of property values to maintain residential segregation.” In general, the FCA opposed any changes to governance that threatened white middle-class control.[10]

Home Rule opponents suggested that Black rule would lead to fiscal disaster, much like Reconstruction when the city overspent and fell into debt with its development and beautification projects. “Stimulation of racial politics in the nation’s capitol,” the Washington Post’s Merlo Pusey wrote, “is not a pleasant prospect.”[11] Noyes argued that the city’s Black population contributed to a reluctance to grant it a congressional representative: “We have had a hard time getting this Congress to discriminate between national representation and the Negro dominating in local suffrage.”[12]

The Mid-Century Home Rule Movement

Even Home Rule’s proponents attempted to downplay its potential racial impact. A 1948 pamphlet issued by the Washington Home Rule Committee, entitled “Getting the Facts about Home Rule,” addressed several misconceptions regarding its possible implementation including the city’s racial demographics. Misconception #4 was “Home Rule Means Domination by Negroes,”  a point advocates sought to downplay, though by the mid-1950s, the city’s population had tipped majority Black.

The mid-century demographic shift revealed the inherent racism in the Noyes/clubwomen alliance. Anna Kelton Wiley serves as a window into these biases. Wiley, a prominent clubwoman and suffragist of the early twentieth century, advocated for Home Rule as vice-president of the JCNRDC and as a leader in the Washington, DC, Federation of Women’s Club’s as late as 1949. “I represent an organization which voted to endorse the Home Rule bill as the only hope for the people here to get any start even toward self government,” Wiley wrote to prominent Washingtonian Jesse C. Suter in 1949. “I both think that if we can manage home rule successfully here it will be a stepping stone to national representation.”[13] Her position drew criticism from some quarters. “WE DO NOT WANT HOME RULE! NEVER HAVE NOR NEVER WILL WANT IT!! I hold no great belief for those in power, but at least they ARE WHITE CITIZENS, TAX  PAYERS, CLEAN AND HONEST!” wrote one correspondent, identified simply as “A White Mother.” “I see by the telephone directory that you have a grown son, but those of us with young children do not want ours to associate with, have social contact with the black element & this will happen with Home Rule! Only those with Commie leanings want it!”[14]

How much this sort of feedback shaped her views or simply sharpened preexisting ones is difficult to say, yet less than a decade later Wiley had reversed course. When President Eisenhower supported legislation enacting Home Rule during the late 1950s, Wiley questioned the decision. As a “loyal republican,” Wiley wanted to support the president but doubted he had “thought of the possible implications of Home Rule, just as he seems not to have thought of the possible implications of that Civil Rights bill, which in the words of Senator Russell ‘would be like a dagger at the heart of the South.’” Wiley added that a city council of Black elected leaders would be “ignorant and full of their own importance,” borrowing “millions,” leading the city into debt and a burden then paid by the city’s paying citizens,” which Wiley perceived as only white residents, since she argued “the members of the Council would probably have no property.”[15] By 1959 she was testifying before the Senate on behalf of the Women’s City Club against home rule.[16]

Home Rule in the Civil Rights Era

While Black Washingtonians had always supported the idea of Home Rule, it took until the mid-to-late 1960s for it to fully resonate, as it became aligned with the flagging civil rights and emerging Black nationalist movements. The short-lived but impactful Free D.C. Movement, which lasted but a few months during the summer of 1966, framed the issue as one of several others afflicting the Black community, including police brutality, poor housing, and failing schools. Marion Barry led the DC chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), while Reverend Walter Fauntroy led local activists in an organized boycott of the city’s businesses opposing Home Rule.

Dating back to the late nineteenth century, the BOT had long opposed Home Rule and used its power to enforce segregation across the city. The BOT argued that the local business community opposed self-governance. Free D.C. refuted this argument and in response encouraged business owners to express their support for Home Rule by displaying “Free D.C.” stickers in their establishment. Focusing on H Street NE and 14th Street NW, the heart of Black Washington’s consumer power, the Free D.C. movement sought to boycott those businesses that did not express support for Home Rule.

Admittedly, Free D.C. stumbled out of the gate when Barry initially called for businesses to donate to a pro-Home Rule political action fund, a tactic that members of Congress, the BOT, and even some proponents of self-government equated with blackmail, such as civil liberties and civil rights lawyer and liberal, Joseph Rauh. Rauh, who supported home rule, was one of Free D.C.’s critics. Though he characterized the Free D.C. movement as extremist, he also believed Home Rule to be essential, writing to presidential advisor Louis Martin during the same summer that “the city is like a tea kettle with many elements putting fuel underneath and the spout blocked by the absence of any political process to relieve the pressure. . .”[17]

Whatever Barry’s initial mistakes, he also set the tone for the movement in a 1966 letter to the public castigating “corporate neutrality” as “immoral” and asking, “Is the company really neutral if it is intimately connected with or belongs to a group, such as the Washington Board of Trade, which opposes self government?”[18] In the end, Free D.C. signed up over 700 businesses in support of Home Rule, refuting the BOT’s argument and granting the movement increased salience.

Despite its success in raising awareness and propelling the issue into the forefront of Black Washingtonians’ minds, the city remained largely voteless, though in 1968 residents gained the ability to elect its school board, which Barry became chairman of in 1972. In the end, it took a combination of local activism, national organization, and federal legislation to enact an elected municipal government in the capital.

The League of Women Voters, who unlike Anna Kelton Wiley and the FCA had remained a supporter of Home Rule throughout the twentieth century, marshaled a national campaign for a DC congressional delegate. Their 1970 campaign, launched on April 15, Tax Day, utilized the slogan, “The Last Colony,” a clever reference to its disenfranchisement but also a subtle nod to the kind of anticolonial politics coming to the fore in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and secured 1.2 million signatures. Within the city, the movement drew upon local activists who galvanized residents. Congress responded, passing the D.C. Delegate Act in 1970, signed by President Nixon in September of 1970. A special election in 1971 led to the election of Walter Fauntroy, a Free D.C. leader, who immediately set off to pass a Home Rule Bill.

Besides the election of Fauntroy, what else changed that made a Home Rule Act viable by 1973? Five different Home Rule bills had passed the Senate over the years, only to die in the House District Committee, run by segregationist John McMillan (D-SC), a man who openly used the N-word to reporters in the 1960s. Working with Representative Charlie Diggs (MI-D), Fauntroy helped gin up opposition to McMillan in his 1972 primary, leading to his defeat, thereby enabling the passage of the bill in late December 1973. The bill was far from perfect. Congress retained control over many aspects of the city’s governance, as evidenced by the veto of the capital’s 2023 crime bill reforms.

Statehood activists, such as Julius Hobson, decried Home Rule as little more than “participatory colonialism.” For leaders like Hobson, the passage of the Home Rule Act made any attempt at greater representation unlikely and fragmented the larger movement. Convinced that Diggs, who worked with Fauntroy toward a Home Rule, would settle for a watered-down bill, Republicans “crafted an extremely limited version of home rule with broad presidential and congressional controls.”[19] For example, residents were unable to elect the city attorney general until 2015.

Home Rule Culturally

For all its imperfections, beyond politics, Home Rule has had cultural and economic impacts. First, it led to Black political leadership throughout the city, which changed the tone and culture of the capital. It enabled greater Black expression institutionally and socially. GoGo, for example, a genre of music unique to the capital and seen as a notable expression of Black culture, emerged under Home Rule. Though the music was not often lyrically political, GoGo bands were and have been a staple of municipal political campaigns for much of Home Rule’s history. “The go-go scene filled a power vacuum, bringing together a steady crowd of Washingtonians in and around the city’s core for fellowship, communion, and the expression of a post-riot, post-civil rights movement urban reality,” writes journalist Natalie Hopkinson.[20]

Second, as the Library of Congress panel noted during their discussion, it enabled a “transfer of wealth” as Black businesses contracted with the city at much higher rates while African American appointees found political and economic success serving in the DC government. Granted, many of the most successful later moved out to the suburbs, creating Prince George’s County (PG), Kojo Nnamdi quipped during the discussion, but PG County remains the wealthiest predominantly Black county in the nation, and for folks like journalist Hopkinson, serves as the real heart of Black Washington as the capital’s demographics trended toward a lighter complexion. “Now the Chocolate City is dying. . .Washington’s Black public sphere” moved east to PG.

Home Rule remains problematic, a point clearly expressed  by the panel. It’s not delivered the city full autonomy nor given residents the complete franchise, noted Tom Sherwood. Sommers noted the veto of the city’s recent crime bill and the antics of politicians in regard to crime. From the middle of the century on, accelerating under the Nixon Administration, the city’s crime rates have national implications, used by politicians to gin up fear and pass troubling legislation that has done little to reduce crime, while targeting marginalized communities and constructing the carceral state that has come to define the nation. DC may be sui generis in regard to its governance, but it’s a laboratory for policies that are often extended to other cities across the nation.

On the city’s tenth anniversary of Home Rule in 1985, Marion Barry, undoubtedly the most influential, famous, and controversial mayor in the city’s history, greeted the occasion with a mixed appraisal. The government had functioned competently to the point of pride, and economically it had its “first bonds, with top ratings, showing the progress this government has made towards financial stability.” Yet troubling clouds were not only on the horizon but overhead. “The city continues to face serious challenges, such as housing shortages, high unemployment among our Black youth and a drug epidemic.” The prison population continued to expand with no sign of abating.

Whether Barry meant the letter as a point of celebration, caution, or some combination of both, it captures Home Rule’s ambivalence and the city’s persistent struggle to meet Washingtonians’ needs. Affordable housing, crime, and racial inequality remain central issues for residents. Home Rule exists simultaneously as a symbol of residents’ agency to secure some level of autonomy while also the major obstacle in regard to national representation. Fifty years later, Home Rule’s legacy feels a lot like Barry’s 1985 letter.

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Featured image: District of Columbia, map, circa 1940s, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.

[1] Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 18.

[2] Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 36,

[3] Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 160-161, 164-165. “The new government was a democratic hybrid, consisting of a presidentially appointed governor, upper Legislative Council, and Board  of Public Works alongside a popularly elected lower House of Delgates, and a non-voting representative in the U.S. House.”

[4] Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 194.

[5] Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 195

[6] Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 194.

[7] Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 195.

[8] Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 196.

[9] Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 269.

[10] Lauren Pearlman, Democracy’s Capital: Black Power in Washington, D.C. 1960s-1970s, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 12.

[11] Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 270.

[12] Asch and Musgrove, Chocolate City, 270.

[13] Anna Kelton Wiley to Jesse C. Suter, July 6, 1949, Box 90, Anna Kelton Wiley Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

[14] “A White Mother” to Anna Kelton Wiley, July 26, 1949, Box 90, Anna Kelton Wiley Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

[15] Anna Kelton Wiley to McLaughlin, July 14, 1957, Box 177, Anna Kelton Wiley Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

[16] Anna Kelton Wiley to the Washington Board of Trade, April 17, 1959, Box 177, Anna Kelton Wiley Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

[17] Joseph L. Rauh to Louis Martin, March 15, 1966, Box 32, Joseph Rauh Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

[18] Marion Barry to the public regarding the Free D.C. Movement, 1966, Box 31, James Forman Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

[19] Pearlman, Democracy’s Capital, 200-1.

[20] Natalie Hopkinson, Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of Chocolate City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 149.

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