Funding for To the Contrary provided by ♪♪ Coming up on To the Contrary, longtime panelist Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton tells her fascinating life story ♪♪ Congresswoman Norton, I have known you for more than 20 years.

But we want to do a whole half hour interview with you because you have become a national treasure.

And and we we just want our viewers to be able to know who you are and what you're starting from childhood, what it was, what life was like for you.

You told me your great grandfather was a runaway slave.

Please tell me about that story.

Well, that's how I got to be a native Washingtonian, Bonnie.

Or at the moment, a third generation Washingtonian.

My great grandfather, Richard Holmes, as my grandfather told it, simply walked off of a plantation sometime in the late 1840s or 1850s.

No conspiracy.

Richard Holmes just walked away and walked all the way to the District of Columbia, where he established himself very well, became a minister.

His son.

My grandfather, Richard Holmes, entered the D.C. Fire Department in 1902.

And I have a wonderful picture of my grandfather with his three or four colleagues in the D.C. Fire Department.

There were all of, I must say, perhaps a half a dozen African-American men in the D.C. Fire Department, all told.

And then tell me about your education and how you ended up at Yale Law School.

I went to segregated schools throughout my life.

Separate but equal.

Yes, such as they were, but not really subject to what people in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia were, which was the back of the bus that we didn't have in Washington.

But I yearned to be in the civil rights movement.

And so while at Yale, I was recruited by Bob Moses, who is one of the most storied leaders of the civil rights movement the first of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he had been a philosophy student at Harvard, the first to go into Mississippi.

There were maybe half a dozen people in Mississippi.

Medgar Evers, who was the president of the NAACP.

He had hold sit ins in Mississippi.

Mississippi was the only state at that point in the early sixties, about 63, that hadn't even had sit in sit ins, had spread all across the South, but not to Mississippi, because you took your life in your hands.

So Medgar Evers led the led the sit in movement.

When I came to Mississippi on my way to the Delta, he met me at the airport, took me around Jackson, Mississippi.

There were so few people with any legal training that he wanted me to stay in Jackson.

And I told him I had convinced sorry, I had told Bob Moses I would come to, to to the Delta.

And so I couldn't possibly remain there.

Took me all around, put me on a bus to go to the Delta around 10:00 at night.

I arrived in Greenwood, Mississippi.

Everything was very worked out.

(inaudible) They took me to the home of some of some farmers.

The farmers told me what to do, that they'd be gone when I woke up, where the SNCC office was.

I did exactly what they told me, heated water on a stove so that I could pour it into a tin tub, a washtub to take a bath was sitting in that tub when a young person knocked at the door and said, Aren't you the student from up north said, Yes, they need you to come right up the street to the SNCC office.

Medgar Evers was shot and killed last night.

He took me to the bus station, went home and was shot in the back.

Here's my introduction to Mississippi.

I got up there, Bonnie, and I'm the oldest person in the room.

Somebody about my age had gone over to get another the great lead woman who was to become a great leader, Fannie Lou Hamer, out of jail because she had been put in jail for getting off of a bus in Winona, Mississippi, nine miles away to use the ladies room.

Lawrence Guyot, who was about my age, went to get her out of jail.

I'm told by these young people younger than me, I'm a second year law student.

Well, now he now he's in jail.

So I said, I guess that means I've got to go try to get him out of jail.

He went to get Miss Hamer out of jail.

He got put in jail.

I'm supposed to get him out of jail.

I was enough of a law student.

So I said, Tell me everything you know.

I just questioned these, I mean, these were 14, 15, 16 year old kids.

They told me that the police chief in Greenwood did not march with the White Citizens Councils when they picketed the office.

One of them, he was racist, but he understood he was law enforcement.

I went to see the man, I said Sir, my name is Eleanor Katherine Holmes.

I'm a student at Yale Law School.

Everybody knows I'm down here.

Not only my mother, father, the dean of the law school.

well, lots of folks know I'm here, but it's going to be up to me to go get people out of jail.

And I'm just asking you one thing, sir.

Would you just call Winona, Mississippi, and tell them I'm coming and that all I want to do is to get the people out of jail, not to be jailed myself?

Bonnie, I went over, found that the man who'd gone before me to get Miss Hammer out of jail had been let out at during the night.

So the white Citizens Councils had been beat so badly, had no clothes on.

When I got there, they had asked him to put something over him.

This Hamer had been beaten mercilessly, but I was not put in jail and we were able to get them out of jail.

That was the Mississippi that I found myself in in 1963.

A whole different world.

Very different.

And today, Mississippi has the largest number of African-Americans in the state legislature of any state legislature in the country.

It's a hard fight.

And tell me about Yale.

Were there other African-Americans in your class?

How many out of how many students?

what was it like for you being an African American woman at Yale at the time you went?

Well, I suppose I might be said to be of the age of tokenism because there were one, two African-Americans in a class Out of ?

A class of maybe a thousand.

my God.

My class stood out because there were 14 women, and that was unheard of.

So it was a time when very few women went to law school.

Few African-Americans went to law school and certainly not to the Yales and Harvards of this country.

I then married a New Yorker, went to work at the American Civil Liberties Union, which was a very much of a career shaping life shaping opportunity for me, because I got to argue before the United States Supreme Court.

I got to represent people with whom I profoundly disagree and got to have a lot of fun.

At one point, you represented the women of Newsweek magazine, and that's become a TV series on one of the online networks.

Tell me about how that case.

How important was that to you?

And and do you look back on it with great pride?

It was a class action against Newsweek for sex discrimination.

Keeping the women down as researchers, never letting them become editors or reporters.

That's precisely what it was.

And the the film that's been made is is called Good Girls Revolt.

And that's what they were, good girls.

Newsweek had the creme de la creme.

These were Phi Beta Kappas and Rhodes Scholars.

So they, of course, wanted all to be a part of what was then the very glamorous publishing business.

And Newsweek and Time were it.

So to get to be there seemed good enough.

Few of them came to see me and said, "Do you think we have a case?"

And I said, Would you like slam dunk?

If all the women and all the men are equally qualified and men are brought in as cub reporters and women are brought in as researchers, they have to rest for the rest of their journalistic lives.

That is an open and shut case of discrimination.

That said, the women didn't say, hurrah, let's go for it.

And there's a reason they didn't.

There had not been and I believe I am correct, a class action brought by women at that time.

Blacks had been waiting for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This was the act, which this is another irony of my life.

I was to enforce later in my life.

But women were, if you'll recall, Bonnie added only half a kind of rear end at the very end of the statute, when somebody said, let's put sex in instead of race, gender, race and religion, etc.. And some thought that that was the way to kill the statute.

Well, it lived to fight another day, but women were not prepared to be a part of a civil rights statute.

But certainly when you're dealing with the women at Newsweek and there've been no class actions, you can point to no role models who had succeeded.

The first thing I had to do was work on what was then called consciousness raising, and to make the women understand that there was strength in numbers, that you could not be fired.

That was an additional violation of the statute.

So the point where they were ready.

Actually they were the courageous ones, and I didn't have anything to lose.

I was only their lawyer.

They didn't know, for example, would they be blackballed?

Yeah, maybe they couldn't be fired.

But what would happen to them for the rest of their career?

Well, ask Nora Ephron what would happen for the rest of their career.

She was one of the few women who left to seek her own fortune.

But many of the others went on to be top flight journalists, not only at Newsweek, but throughout the country.

Fabulous.

That's a fabulous story.

Now, tell me, you were later appointed by President Carter to lead the EEOC.

Yes.

I'd never been a woman to lead the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

And again, I think that speaks to how the commission was born and how it was seen.

Remember, 150 years after slavery, still there was job discrimination and housing discrimination.

There hadn't been any federal law passed.

So when I got to the commission, I was obviously interested in its the mission that brought it to life, but I was very interested in women as well and spent a lot of my time on that aspect, the sex as well as the race aspect.

We brought many class actions turning the agency into not just an individual agency, but into a major class action agency so that you could go after whole classes of discrimination at the same time.

What I discovered at the Commission was that sexual harassment in jobs, Bonnie, was pretty close to sexual savagery.

If if a boss or a supervisor once wanted to.

And it intimidated women enormously to come forward and essentially recount what has happened to them, not that somebody pinched them on the behind, but often much worse, captured them in a bank vault and wouldn't let him out.

What do you do about that?

How do you make women recognize they have a right, but it can't be vindicated if they don't seek to enforce it?

Well, I decided I had to issue sexual harassment guidelines and this the employers were not ready for.

So I called them all in and I said, we're going to this is going to protect you because we're going to describe what sexual harassment is.

So you will know when to hold somebody accountable and how to educate your own employees as to whether or not they may be submitting you to liability for sexual harassment.

It was an important breakthrough.

The guidelines were vindicated by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Well, it's still a lot of sexual harassment in our society.

Guidelines were a very important step forward without putting the onus entirely on the on the woman to come forward, putting the guidelines, putting the onus, therefore, on the on the employer to set out policies that make it possible for enforcement to occur.

It is true that employers woke out very fast, to preventative measures.

Who wants to be sued either for sexual harassment or sex discrimination?

Certainly not racial discrimination.

So, yes, employers would rather spend the money up front training their supervisors and managers than paying a lawyer to defend them once their reputation is sullied by such a lawsuit, even if they're vindicated class action against you.

Ask Newsweek.

We we we were very strategic against Newsweek because Katharine Graham, the famous publisher of The Washington Post, as well as Newsweek, was, of course, the head woman in charge.

Her consciousness hadn't been raised yet then either.

It was subsequently raised.

I got to know her, became a friend of hers.

But at the first negotiation for Newsweek was one of the first things you do when you bring a complaint against a company is you seek to negotiate your way out of it.

Usually you have to go much further.

And we did in this case.

But I insisted that Katharine Graham be there for that first negotiation.

That's very strategic thinking.

As it turned out, this was not part of the strategy.

I was very pregnant.

And so the men at Newsweek didn't quite know how to handle the big bellied lawyer who came in.

So we offer her a seat or she and adversary, how we treat her?

They finally said, I kind of let's get her a chair.

Then they sat on the couch.

And the problem with offering me a chair while they sat on a couch is that the chair sat me above them looking, That was a problem or a benefit?

For me, You can imagine what it was.

But I got to know them as well.

And I mean, all is well.

That ended well there.

But it was it was an important case because it spawned suits of this kind throughout the annals of American journalism and gave women in other categories of work the gumption to sue because of the high profile of the Newsweek women.

So you were chair of the EEOC.

Now you've been in Congress for 12 sessions, 24 years.

You got here before Newt Gingrich took over?

Yes, just before , before he took over Because I was covering Congress.

And that was a massive change.

The Democrats had been in charge of the chamber for 40 years, and they were good friends with the Republicans who were largely moderate Republicans who barely exist in the party now.

That change occurred at the national level, and I decided that I couldn't let that happen to the District of Columbia.

One of the best experiences I've had as a member of Congress is getting to know Newt Gingrich.

Newt Gingrich and I had something in common by the time I came to Congress, I had been a tenured professor of law at Georgetown.

I still teach one course there because I left a lot of my brain there.

And Newt Gingrich is nothing if not a university intellectual.

So I didn't think I could hurt myself by going to talk to him.

So I began to talk to him about the District of Columbia, about wanting to work with him, hoping that he would apply the principles, remember he taught American history of of our own history.

Newt Gingrich was as helpful to me as any speaker has ever been.

He became interested, I think, intellectually interested in his role as speaker and the relationship of the Congress to the nation's capital.

Perhaps the best story about Newt is that during his tenure, they closed the government down repeatedly.

And after they closed it down the first time, I said, Newt, how could you closed it down?

The district had to bring its own budget over to the Congress to let the Congress kind of pass on it before we could spend our own money.

So we were caught in this, even though we had nothing to do with why the government was closed down, said, How could you let them close the district down?

So he said, okay, well, I'll tell you what, Eleanor if we have to close it again, we'll keep the district open.

Sure enough, it closed again and then again.

It must have been four or five times.

Each time there was something in the so called congressional resolution that excluded the district from being closed down.

There came a time when the Congressional resolution did not say, except for the District of Columbia, said, my God, Newt, you promised me.

He said, What is that in there?

I said, No.

He said, staff must have made a mistake.

So tell you what, Eleanor you don't say anything and I won't say anything.

Tell them to keep it open.

So the district did not close down.

I have had to learn to work with Republicans.

I've had very few years when Democrats have been in charge of certainly the House.

They know who I am when it comes to national issues.

I'm not with them.

But it has not been impossible to find Republicans to work with, increasingly difficult to be sure on matters affecting the District of Columbia.

And I've had a lot better luck in finding Republicans to work with.

Not to mention Democrats who have been in charge more often in the Senate.

So you just have to work with the hand you're dealt.

But that's life.

So you have learned how to fight and learned how to get beyond fights and cooperate.

Now, under the Trump administration, you're going to have the fight of your life.

I'm afraid so.

Learn to get beyond fights and not so much cooperate, but to find ways to negotiate.

I hope that Donald Trump is as open as his mind seems to be.

He is bereft of policy, does not seem to have ensconced himself in policy.

He is of more than one mind on so many matters.

My problem is this is more often than the president.

It is the Congress of the United States itself.

So we may find members of Congress doing what I've been able to keep them from doing thus far, wiping out all the gun laws of the District of Columbia.

Imagine what position that would leave a great city in, because great cities, large cities are where you have more guns and more gun crime.

So I could be faced with that, have been faced with it every single year, have been able to beat it down.

And I will have that with a Republican House, Republican Senate and a Republican president.

He is going to have to put some things in his budget affecting the District of Columbia.

Although the District of Columbia pays entirely for itself, there are a few things that do depend upon the president's budget.

And so I am going to have to be in touch with him and work with him.

You once said that if women were to be would become half or more of Congress and you still did business the same way as you have forever.

That wouldn't be progress.

What did you mean?

Yes.

Not enough for for one for you and one for me.

You want women who especially tune in to the very important issues that are facing women.

it's very interesting to note that.

I guess 3 to 1, we have Democratic women, to Republican women.

Republicans don't tend to even elect women to Congress.

And when they do, they tend to go right along with the men.

Having seen that, I don't think it's enough simply to say all we need is half the Congress to be women and everything's - going to be hunky dory.

-What do you want your legacy to be seen as?

Continuing, I don't think of myself in legacy terms, but I do think I've had the the best of what my era had to offer.

That is to say I was born in time for the civil rights movement, to be a part of it and to come home and to apply what I learned and did as a fighter in the civil rights movement to representing my my city, which is perhaps the one jurisdiction in the United States that most needs a fighter.

Why is that?

And it's because it doesn't have this.

That's because the District of Columbia doesn't have the same rights as citizens of of every other part of the United States.

Number one, Bonnie, number one per capita in the amount of federal taxes paid to support the United States government.

I have all the rights and privileges of every member of Congress except that final vote on the House floor.

I'm in.

I can share committees.

I go on the floor and talk like anybody else.

I can do anything anybody else can do.

But what's emblematic of your citizenship is having somebody who can raise their hand down there for you when it comes time to vote on policy.

And the district doesn't have that.

And that's why we're striving to become the 51st state of the United States.

Do you think it'll happen while you're still in Congress?

It may not happen tomorrow or the next day.

It's going to happen.

All right.

Good luck with that.

Thank you so much for your time.

This has been wonderful.

Congresswoman Norton.

Always a pleasure to talk with you Bonnie.

♪♪ Funding for to the contrary, provided by You're Watching PBS Funding for To the Contrary provided by ♪♪ Coming up on To the Contrary, longtime panelist Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton tells her fascinating life story ♪♪ Congresswoman Norton, I have known you for more than 20 years.

But we want to do a whole half hour interview with you because you have become a national treasure.

And and we we just want our viewers to be able to know who you are and what you're starting from childhood, what it was, what life was like for you.

You told me your great grandfather was a runaway slave.

Please tell me about that story.

Well, that's how I got to be a native Washingtonian, Bonnie.

Or at the moment, a third generation Washingtonian.

My great grandfather, Richard Holmes, as my grandfather told it, simply walked off of a plantation sometime in the late 1840s or 1850s.

No conspiracy.

Richard Holmes just walked away and walked all the way to the District of Columbia, where he established himself very well, became a minister.

His son.

My grandfather, Richard Holmes, entered the D.C. Fire Department in 1902.

And I have a wonderful picture of my grandfather with his three or four colleagues in the D.C. Fire Department.

There were all of, I must say, perhaps a half a dozen African-American men in the D.C. Fire Department, all told.

And then tell me about your education and how you ended up at Yale Law School.

I went to segregated schools throughout my life.

Separate but equal.

Yes, such as they were, but not really subject to what people in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia were, which was the back of the bus that we didn't have in Washington.

But I yearned to be in the civil rights movement.

And so while at Yale, I was recruited by Bob Moses, who is one of the most storied leaders of the civil rights movement the first of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he had been a philosophy student at Harvard, the first to go into Mississippi.

There were maybe half a dozen people in Mississippi.

Medgar Evers, who was the president of the NAACP.

He had hold sit ins in Mississippi.

Mississippi was the only state at that point in the early sixties, about 63, that hadn't even had sit in sit ins, had spread all across the South, but not to Mississippi, because you took your life in your hands.

So Medgar Evers led the led the sit in movement.

When I came to Mississippi on my way to the Delta, he met me at the airport, took me around Jackson, Mississippi.

There were so few people with any legal training that he wanted me to stay in Jackson.

And I told him I had convinced sorry, I had told Bob Moses I would come to, to to the Delta.

And so I couldn't possibly remain there.

Took me all around, put me on a bus to go to the Delta around 10:00 at night.

I arrived in Greenwood, Mississippi.

Everything was very worked out.

(inaudible) They took me to the home of some of some farmers.

The farmers told me what to do, that they'd be gone when I woke up, where the SNCC office was.

I did exactly what they told me, heated water on a stove so that I could pour it into a tin tub, a washtub to take a bath was sitting in that tub when a young person knocked at the door and said, Aren't you the student from up north said, Yes, they need you to come right up the street to the SNCC office.

Medgar Evers was shot and killed last night.

He took me to the bus station, went home and was shot in the back.

Here's my introduction to Mississippi.

I got up there, Bonnie, and I'm the oldest person in the room.

Somebody about my age had gone over to get another the great lead woman who was to become a great leader, Fannie Lou Hamer, out of jail because she had been put in jail for getting off of a bus in Winona, Mississippi, nine miles away to use the ladies room.

Lawrence Guyot, who was about my age, went to get her out of jail.

I'm told by these young people younger than me, I'm a second year law student.

Well, now he now he's in jail.

So I said, I guess that means I've got to go try to get him out of jail.

He went to get Miss Hamer out of jail.

He got put in jail.

I'm supposed to get him out of jail.

I was enough of a law student.

So I said, Tell me everything you know.

I just questioned these, I mean, these were 14, 15, 16 year old kids.

They told me that the police chief in Greenwood did not march with the White Citizens Councils when they picketed the office.

One of them, he was racist, but he understood he was law enforcement.

I went to see the man, I said Sir, my name is Eleanor Katherine Holmes.

I'm a student at Yale Law School.

Everybody knows I'm down here.

Not only my mother, father, the dean of the law school.

well, lots of folks know I'm here, but it's going to be up to me to go get people out of jail.

And I'm just asking you one thing, sir.

Would you just call Winona, Mississippi, and tell them I'm coming and that all I want to do is to get the people out of jail, not to be jailed myself?

Bonnie, I went over, found that the man who'd gone before me to get Miss Hammer out of jail had been let out at during the night.

So the white Citizens Councils had been beat so badly, had no clothes on.

When I got there, they had asked him to put something over him.

This Hamer had been beaten mercilessly, but I was not put in jail and we were able to get them out of jail.

That was the Mississippi that I found myself in in 1963.

A whole different world.

Very different.

And today, Mississippi has the largest number of African-Americans in the state legislature of any state legislature in the country.

It's a hard fight.

And tell me about Yale.

Were there other African-Americans in your class?

How many out of how many students?

what was it like for you being an African American woman at Yale at the time you went?

Well, I suppose I might be said to be of the age of tokenism because there were one, two African-Americans in a class Out of ?

A class of maybe a thousand.

my God.

My class stood out because there were 14 women, and that was unheard of.

So it was a time when very few women went to law school.

Few African-Americans went to law school and certainly not to the Yales and Harvards of this country.

I then married a New Yorker, went to work at the American Civil Liberties Union, which was a very much of a career shaping life shaping opportunity for me, because I got to argue before the United States Supreme Court.

I got to represent people with whom I profoundly disagree and got to have a lot of fun.

At one point, you represented the women of Newsweek magazine, and that's become a TV series on one of the online networks.

Tell me about how that case.

How important was that to you?

And and do you look back on it with great pride?

It was a class action against Newsweek for sex discrimination.

Keeping the women down as researchers, never letting them become editors or reporters.

That's precisely what it was.

And the the film that's been made is is called Good Girls Revolt.

And that's what they were, good girls.

Newsweek had the creme de la creme.

These were Phi Beta Kappas and Rhodes Scholars.

So they, of course, wanted all to be a part of what was then the very glamorous publishing business.

And Newsweek and Time were it.

So to get to be there seemed good enough.

Few of them came to see me and said, "Do you think we have a case?"

And I said, Would you like slam dunk?

If all the women and all the men are equally qualified and men are brought in as cub reporters and women are brought in as researchers, they have to rest for the rest of their journalistic lives.

That is an open and shut case of discrimination.

That said, the women didn't say, hurrah, let's go for it.

And there's a reason they didn't.

There had not been and I believe I am correct, a class action brought by women at that time.

Blacks had been waiting for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This was the act, which this is another irony of my life.

I was to enforce later in my life.

But women were, if you'll recall, Bonnie added only half a kind of rear end at the very end of the statute, when somebody said, let's put sex in instead of race, gender, race and religion, etc.. And some thought that that was the way to kill the statute.

Well, it lived to fight another day, but women were not prepared to be a part of a civil rights statute.

But certainly when you're dealing with the women at Newsweek and there've been no class actions, you can point to no role models who had succeeded.

The first thing I had to do was work on what was then called consciousness raising, and to make the women understand that there was strength in numbers, that you could not be fired.

That was an additional violation of the statute.

So the point where they were ready.

Actually they were the courageous ones, and I didn't have anything to lose.

I was only their lawyer.

They didn't know, for example, would they be blackballed?

Yeah, maybe they couldn't be fired.

But what would happen to them for the rest of their career?

Well, ask Nora Ephron what would happen for the rest of their career.

She was one of the few women who left to seek her own fortune.

But many of the others went on to be top flight journalists, not only at Newsweek, but throughout the country.

Fabulous.

That's a fabulous story.

Now, tell me, you were later appointed by President Carter to lead the EEOC.

Yes.

I'd never been a woman to lead the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

And again, I think that speaks to how the commission was born and how it was seen.

Remember, 150 years after slavery, still there was job discrimination and housing discrimination.

There hadn't been any federal law passed.

So when I got to the commission, I was obviously interested in its the mission that brought it to life, but I was very interested in women as well and spent a lot of my time on that aspect, the sex as well as the race aspect.

We brought many class actions turning the agency into not just an individual agency, but into a major class action agency so that you could go after whole classes of discrimination at the same time.

What I discovered at the Commission was that sexual harassment in jobs, Bonnie, was pretty close to sexual savagery.

If if a boss or a supervisor once wanted to.

And it intimidated women enormously to come forward and essentially recount what has happened to them, not that somebody pinched them on the behind, but often much worse, captured them in a bank vault and wouldn't let him out.

What do you do about that?

How do you make women recognize they have a right, but it can't be vindicated if they don't seek to enforce it?

Well, I decided I had to issue sexual harassment guidelines and this the employers were not ready for.

So I called them all in and I said, we're going to this is going to protect you because we're going to describe what sexual harassment is.

So you will know when to hold somebody accountable and how to educate your own employees as to whether or not they may be submitting you to liability for sexual harassment.

It was an important breakthrough.

The guidelines were vindicated by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Well, it's still a lot of sexual harassment in our society.

Guidelines were a very important step forward without putting the onus entirely on the on the woman to come forward, putting the guidelines, putting the onus, therefore, on the on the employer to set out policies that make it possible for enforcement to occur.

It is true that employers woke out very fast, to preventative measures.

Who wants to be sued either for sexual harassment or sex discrimination?

Certainly not racial discrimination.

So, yes, employers would rather spend the money up front training their supervisors and managers than paying a lawyer to defend them once their reputation is sullied by such a lawsuit, even if they're vindicated class action against you.

Ask Newsweek.

We we we were very strategic against Newsweek because Katharine Graham, the famous publisher of The Washington Post, as well as Newsweek, was, of course, the head woman in charge.

Her consciousness hadn't been raised yet then either.

It was subsequently raised.

I got to know her, became a friend of hers.

But at the first negotiation for Newsweek was one of the first things you do when you bring a complaint against a company is you seek to negotiate your way out of it.

Usually you have to go much further.

And we did in this case.

But I insisted that Katharine Graham be there for that first negotiation.

That's very strategic thinking.

As it turned out, this was not part of the strategy.

I was very pregnant.

And so the men at Newsweek didn't quite know how to handle the big bellied lawyer who came in.

So we offer her a seat or she and adversary, how we treat her?

They finally said, I kind of let's get her a chair.

Then they sat on the couch.

And the problem with offering me a chair while they sat on a couch is that the chair sat me above them looking, That was a problem or a benefit?

For me, You can imagine what it was.

But I got to know them as well.

And I mean, all is well.

That ended well there.

But it was it was an important case because it spawned suits of this kind throughout the annals of American journalism and gave women in other categories of work the gumption to sue because of the high profile of the Newsweek women.

So you were chair of the EEOC.

Now you've been in Congress for 12 sessions, 24 years.

You got here before Newt Gingrich took over?

Yes, just before , before he took over Because I was covering Congress.

And that was a massive change.

The Democrats had been in charge of the chamber for 40 years, and they were good friends with the Republicans who were largely moderate Republicans who barely exist in the party now.

That change occurred at the national level, and I decided that I couldn't let that happen to the District of Columbia.

One of the best experiences I've had as a member of Congress is getting to know Newt Gingrich.

Newt Gingrich and I had something in common by the time I came to Congress, I had been a tenured professor of law at Georgetown.

I still teach one course there because I left a lot of my brain there.

And Newt Gingrich is nothing if not a university intellectual.

So I didn't think I could hurt myself by going to talk to him.

So I began to talk to him about the District of Columbia, about wanting to work with him, hoping that he would apply the principles, remember he taught American history of of our own history.

Newt Gingrich was as helpful to me as any speaker has ever been.

He became interested, I think, intellectually interested in his role as speaker and the relationship of the Congress to the nation's capital.

Perhaps the best story about Newt is that during his tenure, they closed the government down repeatedly.

And after they closed it down the first time, I said, Newt, how could you closed it down?

The district had to bring its own budget over to the Congress to let the Congress kind of pass on it before we could spend our own money.

So we were caught in this, even though we had nothing to do with why the government was closed down, said, How could you let them close the district down?

So he said, okay, well, I'll tell you what, Eleanor if we have to close it again, we'll keep the district open.

Sure enough, it closed again and then again.

It must have been four or five times.

Each time there was something in the so called congressional resolution that excluded the district from being closed down.

There came a time when the Congressional resolution did not say, except for the District of Columbia, said, my God, Newt, you promised me.

He said, What is that in there?

I said, No.

He said, staff must have made a mistake.

So tell you what, Eleanor you don't say anything and I won't say anything.

Tell them to keep it open.

So the district did not close down.

I have had to learn to work with Republicans.

I've had very few years when Democrats have been in charge of certainly the House.

They know who I am when it comes to national issues.

I'm not with them.

But it has not been impossible to find Republicans to work with, increasingly difficult to be sure on matters affecting the District of Columbia.

And I've had a lot better luck in finding Republicans to work with.

Not to mention Democrats who have been in charge more often in the Senate.

So you just have to work with the hand you're dealt.

But that's life.

So you have learned how to fight and learned how to get beyond fights and cooperate.

Now, under the Trump administration, you're going to have the fight of your life.

I'm afraid so.

Learn to get beyond fights and not so much cooperate, but to find ways to negotiate.

I hope that Donald Trump is as open as his mind seems to be.

He is bereft of policy, does not seem to have ensconced himself in policy.

He is of more than one mind on so many matters.

My problem is this is more often than the president.

It is the Congress of the United States itself.

So we may find members of Congress doing what I've been able to keep them from doing thus far, wiping out all the gun laws of the District of Columbia.

Imagine what position that would leave a great city in, because great cities, large cities are where you have more guns and more gun crime.

So I could be faced with that, have been faced with it every single year, have been able to beat it down.

And I will have that with a Republican House, Republican Senate and a Republican president.

He is going to have to put some things in his budget affecting the District of Columbia.

Although the District of Columbia pays entirely for itself, there are a few things that do depend upon the president's budget.

And so I am going to have to be in touch with him and work with him.

You once said that if women were to be would become half or more of Congress and you still did business the same way as you have forever.

That wouldn't be progress.

What did you mean?

Yes.

Not enough for for one for you and one for me.

You want women who especially tune in to the very important issues that are facing women.

it's very interesting to note that.

I guess 3 to 1, we have Democratic women, to Republican women.

Republicans don't tend to even elect women to Congress.

And when they do, they tend to go right along with the men.

Having seen that, I don't think it's enough simply to say all we need is half the Congress to be women and everything's - going to be hunky dory.

-What do you want your legacy to be seen as?

Continuing, I don't think of myself in legacy terms, but I do think I've had the the best of what my era had to offer.

That is to say I was born in time for the civil rights movement, to be a part of it and to come home and to apply what I learned and did as a fighter in the civil rights movement to representing my my city, which is perhaps the one jurisdiction in the United States that most needs a fighter.

Why is that?

And it's because it doesn't have this.

That's because the District of Columbia doesn't have the same rights as citizens of of every other part of the United States.

Number one, Bonnie, number one per capita in the amount of federal taxes paid to support the United States government.

I have all the rights and privileges of every member of Congress except that final vote on the House floor.

I'm in.

I can share committees.

I go on the floor and talk like anybody else.

I can do anything anybody else can do.

But what's emblematic of your citizenship is having somebody who can raise their hand down there for you when it comes time to vote on policy.

And the district doesn't have that.

And that's why we're striving to become the 51st state of the United States.

Do you think it'll happen while you're still in Congress?

It may not happen tomorrow or the next day.

It's going to happen.

All right.

Good luck with that.

Thank you so much for your time.

This has been wonderful.

Congresswoman Norton.

Always a pleasure to talk with you Bonnie.

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