GU Law Center honors Norton’s decades of public service with dedication of ‘tower green’

Years before becoming her hometown’s representative in Congress in 1991, DC Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton brought the expertise she had gained from her work in civil rights and employment law to the classroom as a professor at Georgetown University Law Center. This week, the school celebrated Norton’s legacy of public service by dedicating its “tower green” to her.

The lawn next to the law school’s iconic clock tower is now named the “Eleanor Holmes Norton Green,” and a monument and bench will be installed there in her honor.

Norton retired as a tenured law professor at Georgetown last year, after 36 years of teaching. The university granted her an honorary degree at its 2018 commencement ceremony.

Her role as professor overlapped with her Capitol Hill tenure — 28 years and still going — as the District’s non-voting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.

In her speech at Tuesday’s groundbreaking ceremony, Norton said she was grateful for the creative way the law school chose to recognize her and “the deep thoughtfulness that went into the design of the installation.”

She said her work at Georgetown Law allowed her to continue exercising her brain — which, she chuckled, was something not guaranteed in Congress.

The decision to dedicate the tower green to Norton came amid the law school’s preparations for its 150th anniversary, and wanting to recognize the “giants in the history of Georgetown Law,” the school’s dean and executive president, William M. Treanor, said at the ceremony.

The green space named for Norton is located between McDonough Hall and the Scott K. Ginsburg Sport & Fitness Center on the law school campus, at 600 New Jersey Ave. NW.

“I cannot think of a more fitting and unifying person to name the lawn after than Congresswoman Norton because she really epitomizes Georgetown Law Center’s inclusiveness and its social justice and diversity missions,” said Maurita Coley, a 1981 Georgetown Law alumna who is now CEO of Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council.

Mayor Muriel Bowser also spoke at the ceremony, thanking Norton — a native Washingtonian who graduated from Dunbar High School — for her years of dedication to the city and specifically noting the congresswoman’s work to reclaim city land from the federal government and to fight for the cause of DC statehood.

Norton, 81, is now in her 15th term in the U.S. House of Representatives. She is currently chair of the House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit and serves on both the Committee on Oversight and Reform and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

Maureen Lewis, a 1981 Georgetown alumna and native Washingtonian, said as a former DC resident she always felt Norton was a “powerhouse” with a big impact in Congress despite her inability to vote.

In a recent scoring of legislative effectiveness, the Center for Effective Lawmaking in Charlottesville, Virgina, ranked Norton the most effective Democratic lawmaker in the 115th Congress.

Before being elected to Congress in 1991, Norton was the the first woman to chair the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, appointed by former President Jimmy Carter. She also represented women researchers in a landmark civil rights lawsuit against Newsweek in 1970, calling for more opportunities for advancement — a story now fictionalized in the Amazon-original series Good Girls Revolt.

A lifelong civil rights activist, Norton served with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s while she was a law student at Yale, taking part in the Mississippi Freedom Summer and working on the staff for the March on Washington.In continuing its 150-year celebration, Georgetown Law has plans to dedicate its library quad in the next academic year to the late Paul R. Dean, who served as a faculty member at the school for more than 40 years and its dean from 1954 to 1969.