Josh Kramer: The structural racism that created DC government is still holding us back

For its size, DC has an extraordinarily small legislature.

Despite supporting a government with $13.3 billion in total annual expenditures as of 2019, DC’s 700,000-plus residents are represented by just 13 members of the DC Council, created by the 1973 federal law and local ballot measure known as home rule. Wyoming, by contrast, has a 90-seat bicameral legislature for a population under 600,000 and a government with total expenditures of $4.7 billion in 2019.

Large states, like California, have worse resident-to-representative ratios, but in our city-state, the DC Council, the State Board of Education, and the unpaid army of advisory neighborhood commissioners are the only game in town.

One result of this governmental mismatch is a very deep bench of qualified politicians jockeying for a miniscule number of open positions. Exhibit A: the nearly two dozen candidates currently running to replace independent at-large Council member David Grosso this November. The applicants include former Council member Vincent Orange, congressional staffer Christina Henderson, think tank founder Ed Lazere, developer and activist Marcus Goodwin, and State Board of Education member Markus Batchelor. Every state in the U.S. has a pipeline of statewide or federal offices to run for, but that is not the case in DC. We have an excess of talented individuals eager to serve their community and virtually nowhere for them to do it. Or, as political commentator Matthew Yglesias put it in a tweet, “We’ve got a 24 candidate field in a non-partisan first past the post DC Council race and it’s a really dumb way to run a city.” (At this point, it’s Democratic nominee Robert White plus 22 other active candidates vying for the two seats up for election, but the rationale remains the same.)

This didn’t happen by accident. Our system wasn’t chosen because it was the best, or most efficient. It was chosen because it was all we could get at the time. Nearly 50 years later, home rule is showing its age.

The Home Rule Act, the statute that allows the District to (mostly) self-govern, was a compromise bargained between civil rights activists and white supremacists. As the nation reevaluates its commitment to racial equity through the lens of the Black Lives Matter movement, we should reevaluate the history of home rule, and what we might put in its place.

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The main dynamic of the 20th century was well in play by the 1930s: Between the world wars, DC had a significant but segregated Black population and no control over its own administration and resources. The group that evolved into the Greater Washington Board of Trade had existed in some form since 1889 and openly opposed home rule because its white leadership feared Black control. (It has also completely whitewashed any trace of its racist history from its website.) In congressional testimony in 1938, BOT members warned that “Black voters would support huge spending increases, rack up debt, and levy higher taxes, all of which would hurt business, lower property values, and encourage wealthy people to leave Washington,” according to the book Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital by historians George Derek Musgrove and Christopher Myers Asch. Other white men testifying warned of “Negro domination” and said that “the alley will dominate the avenue.”

Fast-forwarding a couple decades, the 23rd Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution in 1961, giving DC residents the right to vote for president. Lyndon Baines Johnson, the first president to earn DC’s electoral support, focused on home rule as part of his push for civil rights. After signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, Johnson appointed Walter Washington as mayor in 1967, one of the first Black mayors of any major American city. After the city convulsed in uprisings after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assasination in 1968, young activists like future mayor Marion Barry took to the streets to advocate for home rule. But if self-governance for Washington seems inevitable in retrospect, it was anything but.

Sympathetic Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives pushed home rule bills in 1950, 1965 and 1966, but their legislation never passed. Dixiecrats, or Southern Democrats who stood in the way of civil rights, blocked home rule again and again. The opposition crystalized in the form of two men: Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Rep. John McMillan of South Carolina. (The reservoir near Howard University is named for a different McMillan.) Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan member, led the Senate appropriations subcommittee in charge of the District’s budget. 

McMillan, serving in the House since just after World War II, headed the House Committee on the District of Columbia. McMillan privileged the testimony of white businessmen on the Board of Trade, still actively fighting home rule. According to Chocolate City, “McMillan, Byrd, and their Southern colleagues reworked city budgets, eviscerating welfare, education, and housing programs while beefing up the police force.” McMillan did his best to keep any bill related to self-governance from ever leaving his committee, succeeding for decades. His racism was not particularly subtle — in response to Mayor Washington’s first budget, McMillan dispatched a truck full of watermelons to the District (now Wilson) Building. 

It took persistent and focused activism on the part of civil rights leaders, including DC Del. Walter Fauntroy, to bring down McMillan. Black activists went to South Carolina in advance of the 1972 election and mobilized voters, who booted “Johnny Mac” in the primary. Rep. Charles Diggs of Michigan, one of 13 co-founders of the Congressional Black Caucus, replaced McMillan as chair of the District Committee in 1973.

Diggs moved quickly, holding hearings through the first half of 1973 and writing a home rule bill. But even with McMillan out of the way, there were other obstacles, and the bill had to be carefully tailored to actually get through Congress. Diggs modeled home rule on LBJ’s appointed government but expanded the DC Council from nine appointees to 13 elected members. As the bill wound its way through the legislative process, limits were added. Instead of a local district attorney, the city’s prosecutor would be a presidentially appointed U.S. attorney. Also, DC was barred from collecting non-resident income taxes from the hundreds of thousands of workers living outside the District. And the other big caveat — the one you’re undoubtedly thinking about right now — came from Rep. William Natcher of Kentucky, who provided his bloc of votes in exchange for one final Southern Democrat demand: the power to review and veto any local law. 

Finally, Rep. Don Fraser of Minnesota, with help and inspiration from Adams Morgan Organization member Milton Kotler, created and inserted the advisory neighborhood commission system into the bill. As Ta-Nehisi Coates eloquently put it, writing for Washington City Paper in 1998: 

“The architects of home rule — many of whom went on to elected positions in D.C. government — made sure the ANCs would never challenge the city’s ruling class. Originally, commissioners weren’t even allowed to meet with their counterparts from other ANCs — a restriction that offended the First Amendment, not to mention activist commissioners. Though this rule was eventually jettisoned, the charter divested the ANCs of decision-making authority, insisting that the council and city agencies merely give ANC resolutions ‘great weight’ when reviewing a matter. The vague standard was a license to ignore ANC recommendations altogether.”

In the end, like many laws, home rule was passed by Congress with a lot of compromise and some luck: Minority Leader Gerald Ford was plucked off the House floor and into the vice presidency, diminishing last-minute Republican opposition. Nixon signed the bill and DC voters overwhelmingly approved the changes in May 1974. But for some in Congress, home rule was a temporary experiment, easily undermined or even undone, and they’ve been treating it that way ever since.

The Reagan era set the template for intervening in District business. Again and again, Congress axed measures passed by the DC Council or blocked local policies via pernicious budget riders: legalizing gay sex, disinvestment from apartheid South Africa, public funding for abortions, you name it. 

“Congress is the local government,” Rep. Philip Crane said in 1981, as recounted in Chocolate City. “We have a responsibility to review everything the DC City Council does — everything.”

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So, how can the District’s government be fixed? One solution, offered up every once in a while, is expanding the size of the legislature. In the late 1990s, a group called Democracy First — led by activist Timothy Cooper — proposed a state legislature with 120 part-time representatives. Last year, now-outgoing Council member Grosso proposed a bicameral legislature with a nine-member Senate and a 27-member Assembly. Legally, a reorganization like this may be possible as an amendment to the Home Rule Act, but there’s no political incentive for council members to vote to dilute their own power or salary.

A larger legislature could replace the ANC system. ANCs can be a powerful tool for neighborhood organizing, or NIMBY opposition, but it’s hard to deny they aren’t working as intended more than four decades later.

According to a DC auditor’s report from earlier this year, fewer than a quarter of commissioners even bothered to respond to a survey on agency compliance with great weight requirements, and about half of those who did reported that “they do not understand which District action requires notification to ANCs.” In this year’s election, 172 single-member districts, or 58%, are uncontested with only one candidate and almost 5% of single-member districts have no candidates.

Clearly, the best solution is statehood, which is at this moment perhaps more viable than it’s been in decades. Statehood offers an opportunity for the city to rethink our government structure and make it more consistent with the 50 other states. The state constitution approved by voters in the 2016 referendum on statehood calls for the creation of a Legislative Assembly with 21 members (two from each ward, four at-large and a speaker). This is a step in the right direction. 

Not only would becoming a state rectify the historical inequity of congressional representation for the people of DC, but it would also set us on a new path of self-governance, free of the influence of racists who successfully limited the power we have over our own city.

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For my understanding of the history of self-governance in the District of Columbia, I leaned on the excellent books Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington, DC. and Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital. You can also get a good sense of the history of home rule and statehood from this FAQ by DCist and a new podcast series from WAMU. 

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Josh Kramer is a cartoonist and journalist living in Northeast DC. He has been published by publications including CityLab, The Atlantic and The Guardian. His projects include Dispatches from 2120 and District Trinidadian. 

This post has been updated to clarify a reference to congressional action via budget riders.