This summer, millions of visitors will fill Washington to celebrate 250 years of American democracy. My family and I will watch them arrive from our front steps and pass them on our morning commutes, and we will welcome them. But I want to put one question to every one of them.
How can the cradle of American democracy be a colony?
Nearly 700,000 people live here. We work, raise our children, bury our dead, serve in the armed forces, and pay federal taxes at a higher rate per person than the residents of any state. Not one of us can cast a vote that counts in Congress. How did the capital of a self-governing nation come to deny self-government to the people who live in it?
The answer runs straight through the city’s history. Before the Civil War, Washington was home to one of the largest free Black communities in the country; by the time the war came, free Black residents outnumbered the enslaved. When Congress granted Black men the vote here in 1867 — over a president’s veto — Black Washingtonians organized and became a political force within a few short years. Congress answered in 1874 by abolishing the city’s elected government and handing the capital to three commissioners appointed by the president. The pretext was a budget scandal. The animating fear, spoken openly in the Capitol and the city’s press, was Black political power. Direct federal rule lasted a full century. Not until the Home Rule Act of 1973 did Washingtonians win back even a limited voice in their own affairs — and Congress kept for itself the power to strike down any law the city passed. It has never once let go of the leash.
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Washington did not drift into disenfranchisement. It was disenfranchised, deliberately, at the moment its Black residents were gaining power.
That history is not behind us. It governs us. Congress has blocked the District from spending its own money on abortion care and clean-needle programs, overturned the taxes its residents voted for, and reversed its criminal-justice reforms. Armed troops patrol our streets. Masked federal agents seize our neighbors — teachers, coworkers, parents, friends — and disappear them into detention. Mass federal layoffs hollowed out the local economy. And a single line dropped from a federal spending bill blew a $1.1 billion hole in a budget the District funds entirely with its own tax dollars. Our money, frozen by a Congress we cannot vote out. No state would stand for it. No state would have to.
The danger is not ours alone. Federal agents have swept through American neighborhoods, tearing people from their families. What separates those cities from mine is a single word: statehood. When ICE ran militarized raids through Los Angeles last summer, California’s leaders and civil rights groups went to court and won an order reining in the operations. When an immigration agent shot and killed a woman in her car in Minneapolis this past January, the governor put the National Guard on alert, activated the state’s emergency operations center, mobilized the state patrol, and told the president and his homeland security secretary to their faces that they had done enough. Washington has no governor to mobilize, no senator to summon, and no vote to withhold. When the federal government comes for us, no one holds the power — or the accountability — to make it stop.
And here is the part that should trouble every American, in every state. In a democracy, the people with the least power are the early-warning system — Washington is the canary in the mine. But movements do not win because the people being harmed cry out. They win when enough people who are not being harmed decide the harm is theirs, too. That is the work of the Together for DC campaign — led by Washingtonians, calling on Americans in all fifty states, from Montana to Maine, to hold their own members of Congress to account and to stand for DC statehood.
If you come to Washington this summer to celebrate what this country promised in 1776, know that the people who live here are still waiting to receive it. In the capital of the United States, it is not the residents who have forgotten what the country was founded on. It is their government. Call your member of Congress. Tell them the people of the District are your fellow Americans, owed the full rights of citizens. Tell them this is your fight too.
Will you join us?
Dorian Warren is co-president of Community Change and Community Change Action, co-founder of the Economic Security Project, and a resident of Washington, D.C.
