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Will not the members of Congress have the same passions which other rulers have had? They will not be superior to the frailties of human nature.… Show me an instance where a part of the community was independent of the whole.… This sweeping clause will fully enable them [members of Congress] to do what they please.… I have reason to suspect ambitious grasps at power.

To which James Madison replied:

Mr. Chairman, I am astonished that the honorable member should launch into such strong descriptions.… Were it possible to delineate on paper all those particular cases and circumstances in which legislation by the general legislature would be necessary, and leave to the states all the other powers, I imagine no gentleman would object to it. But this is not within the limits of human capacity.

Not by accident, then, or unaware of the risks, did the Founding Fathers create the dilemma faced by the citizens in the District of Columbia. From that time to the present, its residents and Congress have repeatedly struggled to untangle these issues. As of this writing, that effort is being led in Congress by DC delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. Without a vote, however, what influence can she wield? After two hundred years of effort, what hope can she have? Norton has sought to use the influence of hope itself, much as had two of the nation’s most influential figures. “George Washington was the paradigm unifying figure, the first American of the new republic; [Martin Luther] King was a profoundly unsettling figure, who challenged the republic,” she wrote in a 1986 Washington Post column commemorating Martin Luther King Day. “Yet King and Washington are not odd fellows thrown together by the fickle if democratic process that produces national holidays. Different as the two men were, they have been honored for the same reason. They managed to draw out the best in the American character.”

Hope drove those who risked their lives to found the nation and has remained the nation’s most influential force. It has also defined Norton’s life. One such pivotal moment occurred in high school. “We heard the chime that told us there would be an announcement,” she later recollected. “I remember the voice of the principal, Mr. Charles Lofton, interrupting class to tell us news of major importance. We had the right to go to any school now. We were stunned, then elated. And I remember believing that the world had changed, literally had changed.”3

Norton graduated in the last segregated class of Dunbar High School in Washington. Among the city’s segregated schools, Dunbar was reserved for academically gifted “colored” students. Its graduates went on to the nation’s premier black colleges and universities, such as Fisk, Tuskegee, Howard, Morehouse, and Spelman. Norton, however, chose predominantly white Anti-och College, an Ohio school with a reputation for being politically left-wing.

Norton herself did not come from a politically radical family. Her father, a third-generation Washingtonian, was an attorney whom she described as a “died-in-the-wool” Democrat. Her mother, a teacher who had migrated from the South, brought with her the traditional customs of southern African Americans. But both parents embraced the spirit of Norton’s great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, who had been the first member of the family to move to Washington. He did so in the dead of night, escaping slavery in Virginia. The Washington into which he had arrived in the early 1850s was risky terrain for an escaped slave. While it had many free African Americans, it also had slaves, and under the Fugitive Slave Act, runaway slaves could be reclaimed at any time. Though the stakes were considerably less for young Eleanor, her venturing to Antioch echoed her great-grandfather’s spirit of risk.

In 1963 the soon-to-become Yale law student ventured into terrain every bit as dangerous as her great-grandfather’s. She traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, to participate in that summer’s historic effort to register African American voters. Arriving in Jackson, she met with the field secretary