VO: To America's founding leaders, the right of suffrage was fundamental.

Governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed.

Yet the quest for democracy in Washington, DC has never been fulfilled.

BOWSER: When you look at the nation's capital, you know, we are very unique, we are a federal district and not a state where 700,000 people that pay taxes, yet we don't have two senators or full autonomy.

SMITH: How is that possible that people who lived in the capital, the heart of our democratic nation and they didn't have complete civic citizenship?

How could that be?

BONDS: The Constitution, I think flows with the people and with society, you know, it ages with society.

But how are we aging?

And that's what we really need to wrestle with.

(soft jazz music) (soft jazz music) (soft jazz music) (soft jazz music) (soft jazz music) SMITH: History is important to be healthy about who we are, we have to know our own history, and I think a community and a city should know its own history to develop a stronger identity for the nation's capital.

GIBBS: One of the constant threads in the existence of the government of the District of Columbia is the desire by citizens to chart their own course, and it's a battle, but it shows that this is a constant refrain.

We want to be in charge of our own destiny.

NORTON: I'm a third generation Washingtonian born in a city where residents had no vote in Congress, no vote for president of the United States, paid federal taxes and had segregation in all of its facilities and schools mandated by the Congress of the United States.

Remember, there was no civil rights movement, so if you wanted to do something that helped move Black people out of out of their virtual apartheid state, being a lawyer seemed to make good sense.

I want to welcome everyone to this historic hearing on H.R.

51, legislation that would make Washington, D.C., our nation's 51st state.

BOWSER: I'm not here to talk about one person, but about 702,000 Americans who deserve full representation in this House.

You're too small, they say, but we're bigger by population than two states.

And what's more, we pay more federal taxes per capita than any state.

We operate our own schools, we issue driver's licenses, license plates, and birth and death certificates.

The fact is, denying American citizens a vote in this body that taxes them goes against the very founding premise of this nation.

SHUFF: D.C.

is not actually a city.

D.C.

is a federal district.

It is under complete control of Congress.

We have absolutely no United States Senate presence, and our delegate to the House of Representatives has no ability to cast a vote in any of the important matters of the day.

BONDS: Washington, D.C., for many years was featured as the stepchild of the region.

SMITH: One factor is that people just didn't know the city was there.

They came to the Mall and they saw the symbols there.

They were surprised that there were churches and schools, houses there.

They just never saw them.

SMITH: Back in 2005, a poll found that 78% of Americans did not realize Washingtonians did not have the same political democratic rights they had.

SMITH: So that was one factor.

But another was that the city was still segregated, and I have to say, it still is.

LOIKOW: The problem was because of our original sin as a nation, which has to do with slavery, the issue of where the national capital would be and whether it was free or slave.

And all these issues kind of got all mixed up together.

MEYERS: And so here we are in capital of the the free world, you know, we're the beacon of democracy and we actually go across the world and demand that other nations have democracy and even fight wars to make sure that they have democracy.

Here we are nestled among the 13 original colonies, and we're still, after all this time, prohibited from having that very common vote in the national legislative body.

SMITH: As we speak here today, Washington, D.C.

is the only capital of any major city in the world where residents do not have the right to vote for their own governor, their own legislature, to send voting members to Congress.

We still don't have that right today while we sit here.

BURKE: As I look at young people coming into the city, oftentimes they're coming from the Midwest, from California or the South.

Many of them are high achieving student council presidents, and they come to Washington with a sense of awe about government.

It's pretty much a rude awakening when they discover that their vote doesn't count in Washington as much as it would count in some other state.

VO: They debated where to locate the capital, chose to build on this site in the heart of slave country.

BOWLING: Once independence was declared in 1776, Congress had to deal with all sorts of issues.

Where was power going to lie?

One view is a large, powerful federal government.

The other is powerful states - centralists versus decentralists.

Or it's the issue of federalism.

And one of the ideas that people who believed in a strong central government was that the federal government in order to have authority and power, needed a seat of its own, one that it controlled, that it had exclusive jurisdiction over.

ASCH: Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong national government, a centralized government, to send a message to the world about the vision for the future of this new nation.

Whereas Thomas Jefferson believed in a very decentralized small government and his vision for America was of a nation of yeoman farmers.

He did not envision a grand capital at all in the scale of what you had in the old world of a Paris or a London.

They wanted to place it in essentially plantation country, where they felt like it could be contained.

BOWLING: But something happened in 1783.

There was a mutiny of the Continental Army.

So what they wanted was their promises that had been made to them in terms of money.

But they knew Congress had no power to collect revenue The only way to get money was ask the states.

Well, a lot of times the states couldn't pay, but the soldiers knew that Pennsylvania had revenue because they had tariffs in Port of Philadelphia raised a great deal of money for the state of Pennsylvania, and the soldiers marched to Philadelphia in front of the Pennsylvania State House So to show you how subordinate the federal government was at this time, Congress didn't have their own place to meet, and the centralists began to publicly talk about that Congress needed exclusive jurisdiction over its own territory in order to protect itself.

Hamilton wanted the United States government to assume the debts of the States, the Revolutionary War debts, and so Jefferson put on this magnificent dinner.

And this was the compromise.

Alexander Hamilton agreed for a temporary seat of government in Philadelphia for ten years and a permanent seat of government on the Potomac.

In the end, the Constitution is ratified and Congress decides to locate a seat of federal government permanent location.

(men singing) VO: The Capitol was the center of the slave trade.

Auctions and holding pens operated near Lafayette Square across the street from the White House.

Hotels offered underground cells for Congressmens' slaves and guaranteed they would pay the value of any might escape.

Washington was built on plantation society, where slavery was embedded into the economy of the region.

MAN: So here we had this new nation, conceived in liberty, that was also built upon enslaved labor and the city itself.

Washington itself was built by enslaved workers.

This was something that the late 18th century people noticed right away.

It's very visible.

You have slave pens within sight of the Capitol.

There are slave coffles, men and women chained together, walking through the streets of the city.

(men singing) LOIKOW: It was always intended by the founders that Congress would figure out how to give us the same right to govern ourselves that people living in states had.

The problem is the Constitution is all written in terms of states' powers.

And if you are not a state, there are vast pieces of it that do not apply to you.

MAN: Up to that point, people who lived in Washington, if they lived on the Maryland side of the Potomac, they would vote in Maryland elections.

They lived on the Virginia side, they voted in Virginia.

VO: The bitter election of 1800 changed that entirely.

The Federalist, John Adams ran against Thomas Jefferson, head of the Democratic Republicans.

Federalist had mere weeks before Jefferson assumed office.

They passed the Organic Act of 1801, which organized the District of Columbia as a federal territory under the exclusive control of Congress BOWLING: After the election of 1800, when Federalists were driven from office.

They enacted exclusive jurisdiction, which meant that the residents of Washington, D.C.

are going to lose their congressional representation because they're not going to be in a state anymore.

They were in Maryland and they were in Virginia throughout the 1790s, but now they're in a federal district that is no longer part of two states, but it is an independent district over which Congress exercises exclusive jurisdiction, and the Federalists adopted the Organic Act, which assumed exclusive jurisdiction over the seat of federal government.

ASCH: They wanted to create this federal city that would be immune to pressures of local politics.

Madison and others imply that, of course, the citizens of this federal district would have the right to vote.

But when it comes right down to it and the Organic Act is passed in 1801, it's stripped away.

BOWLING: Within a year, Hamilton, one of the main supporters of the Constitution, is saying, Hey, we have an oversight here, we've got to deal with it.

If we're going to have exclusive jurisdiction, we've got to have a way for representation for the residents.

VO: But no action was taken.

Within a few months of the capital's birth, the disenfranchisement of D.C.

residents became federal law.

William Seaton was elected mayor of Washington, D.C., and served from 1840 to 1850.

Congress sought to undermine him by eliminating D.C.

's charter.

At the last minute, the bill was tabled and Seaton proved to be an instrumental local leader in public education and welfare with expanded telegraph, gas lines, and the first waterworks.

Black residents were on their own.

John F. Cook, Sr.

was born enslaved in Washington, D.C., in 1810.

An industreous aunt bought his freedom and the freedom of his family.

John Cook became a major D.C.

leader, founding the Union Bethel and 15th Street Presbyterian Churches, centers of refuge for freed and enslaved Blacks.

Tensions over disenfranchisement continued through the 1800s.

D.C.

suffered from neglect and from congressmen blocking development to protect competing interests in states they represented.

Charles Sumner called it an example for all the land African-Americans in D.C.

rose from enslavement to freedom, from service in the Union Army, to suffrage and elected office, and began to hope to be acknowledged as full Americans.

SMITH: When the Ten Mile Square was created for the District of Columbia in 1790, the provision for citizenship within that area that was not a state was a problem.

At first, in fact, citizens could vote for their own local council but they did vote for members of the City Council and the mayor.

That ended after the Civil War.

The Civil War changed everything.

The Civil War almost destroyed the city.

Troops, thousands of troops had been going over these dirt streets.

There were huge sanitary problems.

There were people who wanted to move the capital.

BOWLING: Washington, D.C., is not referred to as the capital until the 1870s, and that happened as a result of an attempt to move the seat of government off the Potomac to St.

Louis, Missouri on the Mississippi.

ASCH: And the Civil War transformed the city.

It becomes the home of the Union Army, the headquarters of the Union Army.

And so the city is inundated with newcomers of all kinds, the soldiers who are here mustering in the streets, bureaucrats who are going to work in the growing war machine to administer the war, and also tens of thousands of former slaves who come to the city seeking freedom.

From the very beginning, African-Americans see this as a war about freedom.

Anywhere the Union Army goes, African-Americans who are enslaved on local plantations trail along the Union Army.

They settle right next to Union Army encampments all around the city, so the city's Black population grows enormously during the Civil War.

GIBBS: Freedom seeking Black folk came and collected at every union, fort and depot, and many of these Black folk came to where there were jobs.

And yet white Washingtonians were hostile to this increasing number of Black people.

VO: Washington became the site of a major military base, with hospitals functioning in churches, schools and government buildings.

Camps where families lived in miserable conditions and tar paper chanties and former soldiers barracks.

The Black population swelled to 40,000.

SMITH: So Lincoln needed to do the Emancipation Proclamation to essentially arm the slaves to get them into the Union Army and that's really one of the most dramatic stories we tell here is that we have 209,000 names.

Of those 209,000, 150,000 of them were enslaved when the war started.

They literally put on Union uniforms, as Douglass said, with bullets in their pockets and rifles on their shoulders.

They walk out on these battlefields and they fight their way to freedom.

Once these guys get into the south, once the Massachusetts 54th marches into South Carolina, their role down there is electrifying.

It's electrified, they electrify everybody.

ASCH: And the war ushers in a new set of national leaders who take over Congress, who now don't have an opposition party.

So in a sense, they have free reign to pass a raft of legislation that's going to remake the face of Washington and the face of the country.

And so in April 1862, radical Republicans pushed through an emancipation bill for the District.

So this is 8, 9 months before the Emancipation Proclamation.

Enslaved people in Washington are the first freed in the country.

GIBBS: It says that April 16th will be the day that will stand in American history, next to July 4th, in that in its impact, it sends a clear signal that D.C.

emancipation is a critical step in the process that brings the United States into the freedom path.

ASCH: But that's just the beginning.

The radical Republicans pass a bill calling for public schools for Black children.

They push for integrated streetcars and then is a bill for Black suffrage, and they want to allow Black men in the District to vote.

GIBBS: This has great meeting in Washington, D.C., because we see that in 1867, Black men are allowed to vote.

We see in 1868 that we have Black men running for political office.

To many whites in D.C., it seemed as though the world had turned upside down.

SMITH: These men earned their right to vote on the battlefield.

They came to the defense of this country when other people were trying to tear it apart, when we needed them to help stand up for us.

And they have earned their right to vote.

They earn citizenship on the battlefield.

GIBBS: There is a chain of circumstance where freedom is step one.

Education, perhaps step two, but along with education, there must be the franchise.

There is simply no alternative because when we look at the South at the end of the Civil War and for the next century, they are regularly denying Black people the right to vote so they were willing to resort to all kinds of the original dirty tricks to nullify the Black vote.

And if cheating at the ballot box did not work, then brutal, overt force was often relied upon to get their way at the polls.

ASCH: Race has always been closely intertwined with democracy and efforts to win democratic representation in the city.

During the brief flowering of interracial democracy, it was precisely this idea of Black Power that so enraged and frightened white conservatives that they were willing essentially to trade their own enfranchisement in order to protect themselves from what they feared would be Black domination.

GIBBS: White D.C.

residents were angry and bewildered at the pace of change, the insistence of Black demands and the expansion of the Black population.

And an excellent example of that is the banishment of Black people from the Easter egg hunt at the White House and Black people go and start it at the National Zoo.

SMITH: It didn't last very long.

The most powerful person was Alexander Shepherd.

ASCH: So Alexander Shepherd was the son of a slave owner.

And by the eve of the Civil War, had become one of the richest men in the city.

He was on the City Council.

He voted against emancipation.

After emancipation gets passed by Congress, he says, "Okay, that's it.

I hope all discussions of the Negro question are at an end.

We need to focus on economic growth."

SMITH: He paved the streets.

He put in gas lights, he put in sewers.

He totally modernized the city and people began to come and live there, but he spent too much money.

He was supposed to spend $6 million and he spent way too much.

So beginning in 1878, Congress decided to take away all of the self-government that the city had.

VO: John Tyler Morgan, a six-term senator from Alabama, was an advocate for white supremacy and Jim Crow laws in D.C.

GIBBS: John Tyler Morgan, a southern senator, a member of the Klan, the former Confederate officer, compared the robbery of the elective franchise to burning down the barn to kill all the rats.

And so if white people had to suffer in an effort to kill the Black vote, then so be it.

RASKIN: "Union and liberty."

This was the cry of Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans in the 19th century.

It's the cry of the people of Washington, D.C.

today who want to join the union on the basis of equal citizenship and full voting rights.

The inescapable imperative of American history is to give everybody equal rights, equal citizenship and the right to participate in our government.

SMITH: We had no locally elected government in Washington from 1874 to 1974.

Until 1974, we had a form of government called the commissioner system.

There were three commissioners appointed by the President of the United States.

Those commissioners worked with Congress and the congressional committees that were controlled by the Congress and the committees that dealt with the District and appropriations for the District.

They worked with the commissioners and the commissioners, worked with the D.C.

Board of Trade.

VO: The Washington Board of Trade partnered with the House District Committee as Washington's secret government.

GIBBS: The commission form of government was a way to ensure the operation of the basic services of the city.

But without giving citizens a chance to impact it through the elective franchise, which it was done by design.

And it turned out to be the longest single form of government the nation's capital has ever had.

VO: Life for D.C.

Black families became dramatically worse under President Woodrow Wilson, elected in 1912.

Wilson was hailed as the first Southerner in the White House since the Civil War.

In 1913, Wilson segregated federal offices and fired or demoted most Blacks from government positions.

SMITH: He brings that same southern Jim Crow-ism.

Segregates to all of the businesses here, builds Black restrooms and government printing office and the FBI and other buildings here in the city.

The Blacks go to one room, whites go to another.

He limited the number of positions that African-Americans have in that government.

They couldn't go above a certain level.

It was much like apartheid in South Africa.

VO: By 1957, Washington, D.C.

was the first major urban area in the nation to be majority Black.

A new era emerged with the rise of civil rights leaders white and Black.

C.R.

GIBBS: It was necessary to pull out by the roots.

Those discriminatory aspects of the local government and ended the one sure way to do that would be self-government.

Fair, self-government, full self-government.

VO: South Carolina Representative John McMillan, chaired the district committee from 1948 to 1972, he blocked every effort to expand local rights.

McMillan once said no one seems to object to the work performed by this committee except the public.

MAN: They were just the top business people in the town, and that's where the power lay.

SMITH: If you wanted to work in the D.C.

fire department, you could file an application and run Macmillan's office in South Carolina.

African-Americans in D.C.

couldn't work in the fire department.

We live here, work, pay taxes.

We couldn't get a job.

We had to get rid of these people because they were running D.C.

like a plantation.

C.R.

GIBBS: It was run by a kaval of people, senior politicians, committee chairs from Congress.

McMillan, who seemed to be genetically almost predisposed to denying any form of control to district citizens and particularly those of a darker hue.

C.R.

GIBBS: But in order to understand that we must go back to the end of the territorial form of government, we must look at the animus that came out of the decision by Congress to take the entire elective franchise away from the people who would depend upon it.

In an effort to block the Black vote.

CASSELL: I was born in Washington, D.C., in 1924.

My father was an architect and he had built the house that I grew up in.

He wanted to go to Cornell University and become an architect and design buildings.

He was his counselor, called him in and said, I don't think that's a good idea.

Your competence that you gain here in this segregated high school in Baltimore, Maryland is not enough to get you into Cornell.

But his mother, she said you want to become an architect, then you become an architect.

As I grew older, I began to accept my father more, his sterness and his discipline.

My mother used to try to make me understand that he brought home a lot of the frustrations of a very prominent professional who still had to accept the discrimination, and he was very, very much disturbed at the fact that he'd go shopping at Landsberg or Hechts and couldn't use the restroom, you know.

He became so concerned about the discrimination, especially in housing.

He decided that he would build a new city for us Africans where we would control our destiny.

So he bought with his own money, a 500 acre farm on the Chesapeake Bay.

Senator Carter Glass of Virginia rose on the floor of the Senate and strongly opposed the idea of the federal government putting money into a new city for colored folks.

The federal government cut off the money.

MAN: Congress controlled how the city was run.

♪♪ ♪♪ SHUFF: Up until 1964, residents of the District of Columbia couldn't even participate in the presidential election.

There's a bit of a cultural lore that the Russians were actually shaming the United States because their capital couldn't even participate in the presidency, and that's what the impetus for the amendment was.

VO: In 1960, Congress passed legislation for the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution, which finally allowed district residents voting rights in the national presidential election.

A year later, it was ratified.

SMITH: The 23rd Amendment gave the city its first vote in 100 years, and it was a vote for the President of the United States.

It still didn't give us a local franchise, it didn't give us any local government.

VO: The 23rd Amendment was as far as Representative McMillan was willing to go.

He was heard to say, "A D.C.

vote for president and vice president should satisfy D.C.

residents, at least for a while."

♪♪ SMITH: They were talking about the sixties and seventies now, and change was taking place.

It was a great time for change.

♪♪ One of the things you learned in Washington was that you couldn't tell exactly how things were going to come out and taking simplistic answers like ethnicity didn't help.

VO: Civil rights activists challenged the lack of voting rights in Washington, D.C.

Julius Hobson stood out.

He was an army veteran from Alabama.

During the early 1960s, he launched a court case that ended segregation in D.C.

schools, helped secure 4,000 jobs for African-Americans and demanded fair housing regulations.

CASSELL: In 1960, I had a call from Julius Hobson.

He said, I hear you're a good man and I got an organization called the Congress of Racial Equality.

I want you to come and work with me, and we're going to make some changes in this town and you know how things are.

You grew up in a town, didn't you?

I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama.

It's even worse down there than it is here.

SMITH: Julius Hobson probably got more civil rights activities passed than almost anybody other than, say, a few people like Martin Luther King, but in D.C., where nobody was paying any attention, so he never got any credit for it.

HANRAHAN: He didn't care if he took on the elite Black community or the elite white community.

If they were doing something wrong, he would go after them.

You know, he had everybody against him, because he was doing the unspeakable.

♪♪ VO: Hobson and other activists opposed a freeway that would have cut through the city.

That struggle lasted 12 years.

HANRAHAN: This freeway would have destroyed the city.

And it would have taken at least two to four thousand houses down with it.

And, of course, you know what kind of neighborhoods.

Those were poor Black neighborhoods.

HOBSON: Julius was able to do things very quickly.

There was just a shared dream, I guess, or a shared knowledge.

And they were all knowledgeable.

I don't know.

He was a good organizer in his fashion CASSELL: And we started to doing a variety of things.

One of those things was that the Capital Transit Company would not hire African-Americans as motor men or bus drivers.

So we decided we were going to change all that.

♪♪ Then there was the question of buying clothes downtown.

Now young African-American men liked to buy snappy clothes.

And there was a Bruce Hunt.

So Hobson said, well, "I want to see the manager."

"Who are you sir?"

"My name is Julius Hobson.

And I have determined that you're getting 60 percent of your business from African-Americans.

But yet you won't hire any of them.

I'll tell you what this is Friday, I'll be back here Monday.

And when I get here on Monday I want to look over and I want to see some dark-faced, thick-lipped, wide nostril Black people working on the counters."

Monday morning we came back with our signs.

Don't buy where you can't work.

Black people stopped buying.

So the interesting thing is that there were many white people who joined us.

HOBSON: Julius was litigious.

When you do something in law, you have to have the facts.

And Julius dealt in facts, because he was an economist.

And he also got the best lawyers, volunteered to help him on some of these things.

CASSELL: So, yeah, we became quite popular.

And we got arrested regularly.

HOBSON: But the police, he was always courteous with the police and they were always courteous with him.

♪♪ In the poor sections of town, they were overrun with rats.

And I think this is still when there were three people representing the government.

And so the three people were asked for money to get rid of the rats in the poor section of town.

And the answer they gave was, no.

We don't have the money.

HANRAHAN: He knew that there was no money for rat abatement anywhere in the city, except Georgetown.

And somehow he got a crate that you could see through and somebody gave him a rat and he put it in the crate and he said he was gathering rats from Anacostia, and he was going to bring them over to Georgetown and let them free.

HOBSON: And the reporters asked him and he attracted people and they see, he said, "What are you going to do with those rats on the top of the car?"

He said, "Well, if they won't pay to get rid of the rats in one part of town, then we'll just equalize the rats."

Well, the money came practically the next day to get rid of the rats.

♪♪ BARRY: Lyndon Baines Johnson, to me, was the best President we ever had in the United States of America as it relates to race and as it relates to Civil Rights.

Well, once they passed the law, it was his job to execute the law.

And the way he did it was so creative that to this very day we are benefiting from that time of Lyndon Baines Johnson's war on poverty and fair deal.

VO: He appointed Walter Washington as Mayor Commissioner in 1967.

♪♪ ♪♪ SMITH: We finally got an appointed mayor, Walter Washington, sent John McMillan his budget.

McMillan responded by sending him a truckload of watermelons.

And he was a classic example of southern rulers of the city.

♪♪ He blocked Home Rule because he didn't want it.

I mean, he was telling the city how it should do its business.

BARRY: Home Rule at that time was what we called full representation.

Just in terms of being able to control our budget.

We are a city that no matter what we vote on and no matter who's taxes it is, the last decision is made by the Congress.

We can pass a law and they could undo it with the stroke of a pen.

♪♪ [Gunshot] KENNEDY: I have some very sad news for all of you.

And I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world.

And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

[Shocked sounds from crowd] VO: Riots erupted in 110 cities nationwide.

Washington was among the hardest hit.

MAN: The a fire in the troubled areas, children coughing, trying to escape.

VO: President Johnson sent in federal troops and D.C.

National Guardsmen to regain control.

MAN: The flames damaged or destroyed more than 40 buildings.

Firemen doing their best to contain the flames.

The casualty toll so far three dead, 350 injured.

JOHNSON: I know that every American of goodwill joined me in mourning the death of this outstanding leader and in praying for peace and understanding throughout this land.

SMITH: I went up to H Street and saw how many of the buildings were burned down and falling down.

It was very frustrating because you didn't know where to move.

♪♪ [Phone ringing] WOMAN: Mr.

Barry's office.

May I help you?

BARRY: We're not going to pay federal excise tax.

Is Miss Harris in?

This is Marion.

SMITH: Marion Barry was the leader of the Free D.C.

Movement and the anti-fair increase.

And he was a very bright guy.

BARRY: And you folks are supposed to be protecting the... VO: Marion Barry Jr., son of a Mississippi Civil Rights activist, arrived in Washington, DC in 1965.

He became the most influential and savvy politician of a generation.

Barry offered government jobs and federal contracts.

He challenged patronage arrangements that had long kept an exclusive set of people in power.

BARRY: I don't think any other people in America can take this kind of stuff.

MEYERS: Marion Barry was the first National Chairman of SNCC.

So he was a true Civil Rights leader.

BARRY: We were in what he called an occupied army, because all of the police and all of the fire people were hired by Mr.

McMillan from Congress, from South Carolina, and they would come up here and get these jobs and then they would be like, it would be like a plantation.

They ruled over the residents, which were at that point 80 percent are African-American.

So the racism was there and the segregation was absolutely there.

People lived in certain parts of town period.

BONDS: Walter Fauntroy.

He was our first delegate to Congress and in those days he came out of the Civil Rights Movement.

As you know he was one of the organizers of Dr.

King's March on Washington.

And so he had a great rapport with the religious community.

And so there was a lot of uplifting in those days.

♪♪ VO: In 1971, Walter Fauntroy was elected DC's non-voting delegate to Congress.

A year later he rallied South Carolina voters to defeat John McMillan.

SMITH: We all took busses down to South Carolina to work in John McMillan's district.

And we went down there and started working down there and brought it out.

The next election he was voted out.

That became a symbol to other people in the Congress too by the way.

SMITH: And once he was defeated, legislation came almost immediately to the floor of the Congress that gave us our Home Rule Bill in 1973.

♪♪ VO: D.C.

residents were voting for local leaders for the first time in a century.

The newly passed Home Rule opened elections to the mayor, a city council and a non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives.

MAN: How you all brothers doing today.

I want you to come on out and vote tomorrow now.

WOMAN: First of all, you have to register.

Wait a minute, sign right there.

MAN: Congratulations.

MAN: Thank you, sir.

WOMAN: I think this is incredibly exciting.

Which way do we go?

MAN: All those in favor raise their hand.

All those opposed?

VO: Walter Washington became DC's first elected mayor since 1874.

MEYERS: It's interesting that the first D.C.

Council, the first home rule council in 1974 was basically a Civil Rights Council, because D.C.

itself was a Civil Rights Movement.

BARRY: I was like fascinated with the city, you know, I'm from California and California was very whitewashed.

And I called my mother and I said, Mother, there are Black people everywhere.

They're all on the corner.

They're listening to boom boxes.

It was like, I don't know, like I had died and gone to heaven.

And I said I think I'm going to move back to Washington, D.C.

because I like it.

So it was a real, thriving city at that time.

Yes.

♪♪ ♪♪ MEYERS: We call it colonial rule, because we do not have full self-determination.

Various intrusions into our budgets.

Everything we do, of course, has to be approved by U.S.

Congress.

And so we had the wisdom, the precience to design a major convention center that anticipated the growth of conventions.

They didn't allow us to put in permanent seating, because the Maryland Delegation wanted to make sure nothing could compete with the Capital Center out there.

VO: Others turned to statehood as the only valid option.

CASSELL: Well, the home rule simply meant that you could elect your Mayor and you could elect the City Councilor.

But everything that they did had to be approved by the Congress.

So we didn't have self-government and we had no representation in the Congress.

That's why Hobson called it home fool, it's fooling people into think that they've got a government.

BARRY: Statehood was making us, you know, having two representatives and a Governor and what everybody else had.

And that was always the struggle.

Full representation or financial independence.

CASSELL: The only way for us to get rid of this non representative government is to become a state just like everybody else.

♪♪ VO: Journalist Sam Smith outlined how statehood could be achieved in his D.C.

Gazette, a citywide alternative newspaper.

CASSELL: So what do we have to do?

Well, form a statehood party, and we will run candidates for office.

♪♪ At that time Hobson is a very popular City Council member.

So they passed it.

They gave us 90 days and $250,000, which was much shorter time than all the other states had to write their Constitutions and much less money than other states had.

We wrote that constitution in 90 days.

But we were pretty good campaigners.

We knocked on doors.

We did everything.

This is our chance.

We are the only American citizens who have to pay local tax and a federal tax, but we don't have any representation.

We got to have the statehood.

Right?

♪♪ BARRY: He had a lot of resistance.

As a matter of fact, to be quite honest, it wasn't White, I mean, there were Black people who were not used to shaking mayorship to vote.

I mean, he rocked the boat.

He turned the boat over.

He blew the boat up.

And there's a whole lot of people who didn't like it, but he got through because there was enough people behind him, which was most of the people in the city.

When it was actually Chocolate City.

I mean, Walter Washington was the establishment candidate, you know, let's take our time and sit down and Marion was like kick the door in, you know.

So that was the difference and kick the door in won.

MAN: Because they don't accept me as a first class citizen.

WOMAN: Go ahead, you are a first class citizen.

MAN: No, I'm not.

Name a place where I'm a first class citizen.

WOMAN: Just tell me where you're not accepted on that.

I think you got all the rights by law.

Haven't you?

GIBBS: So when we look at his fundamental contributions, the things that history will recognize and reward Marion Barry for, it was burning the embers of the Jim Crow city, broadening the employment of African-Americans in the city government.

Also, his entre into the battle of statehood.

♪♪ CASSELL: Marion was deeply involved and concerned with politics.

And he felt that what you ought to do is establish relationships among these people so that you can get things done, you know, establish relationships with Congressmen and so forth.

BARRY: And you see Black people doing it has to make you feel good, particularly where you've been told all your life that Africa is a dark continent and as I traveled throughout Africa, something that hit me emotionally and psychologically you could not just leave it without thinking greatly about slavery, about the conditions of our people and slavery and a conditions of our people now in America.

♪♪ VO: Barry was charismatic, but his personal life was filled with drama and scandal.

♪♪ MEYERS: There are two sides of the Marion Barry coin.

And unfortunately, it's split off by race.

Whites tend to, not everybody, view Marion Barry for the disgrace, the national and international disgrace of the crack pipe and the crumbling of the government in the latter few years of the Barry administration.

But there's another side to it.

It's deeper than that.

It's not appreciated so much in the white community.

Before Marion Barry the government was largely white.

And I'm talking about the leadership, the agency heads, all the way down to clerks and you name it.

Marion Barry came in, we had a new way of hiring people where everybody counted.

We began to be a very diverse government.

And a thriving Black middle class began in D.C.

Thanks to Marion Barry the contributions are not going to be forgotten.

And that's why he's considered a hero.

♪♪ ASCH: Every time suffrage came up as an issue through the course of the 20th century, people brought in this fear of Black voters voting for irresponsible politicians as a way to sink those efforts.

♪♪ VO: In 1995, Congress established a Financial Control Board to oversee District finances.

♪♪ MAN: In 1998, a lawsuit was filed dealing with voting rights, and a number of people, now Representative Jamie Raskin was involved at that point.

And including our founders Joe Sternlib and Daniel Solomon.

And D.C.

Vote was founded really as a coalition of organizations to bring together an effort to teach people around the country and especially around the District what our lack of voting rights are, our lack of representation and the overarching involvement of Congress means for the residents of D.C.

ASCH: In the late 20th century, early 21st century there's such a parallel between race and membership in the Democratic Party.

Well, in the District race and party go hand in hand.

NORTON: If, in fact, the District of Columbia was a largely Republican city these members would be on the floor arguing for voting rights for the District of Columbia.

Just as the radical Republican abolitionists gave us the vote, which was then taken from us, and gave us Home Rule.

I will not yield, sir.

The District of Columbia has spent 206 years yielding to people who would deny them the vote.

I yield you no ground.

Not during my time.

You have had your say and your say has been that you think that all people who live in your Capital are not entitled to a vote in their house.

Shame on you.

♪♪ SMITH: Voting is the way you speak in a democratic society.

The way you speak is with your vote.

And if you can't vote that means you can't speak.

♪♪ ♪♪ BOWLING: A lot of people think the only way we can be represented is statehood.

Washington, D.C.

is something special.

It's greater than a state.

And that's the solution that I believe in.

And that is to give the federal district a status, a national capital territory, which it is in effect already, and give it representation.

But don't call it a state.

SMITH: Right now D.C.

is essentially a colony of the United States.

It's like the Virgin Islands or Puerto Rico.

We have this fairly simple solution, which could take place just by the passage of a law in D.C.

would become then equal with other states.

BARRY: The question that really has to be asked is, can we have full independence, can we have full representation without having statehood?

And that's what no one has been able to answer.

♪♪ BIGGS: The struggle for self government and full representation in the District shows us that desire to shape your own destiny beats in the heart of all of us.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪