Federal Overhaul is a multipart sequence that explores the impression of the Trump administration’s restructuring of the federal authorities on Black communities.
WASHINGTON — For many of 61-year-old Jocelyn Frye’s life, her hometown of Washington was majority Black. As a toddler, she was keenly conscious of how some white lawmakers would disparage D.C. and assert that its residents had been harmful.
“The predominantly white Congress was nearly like an overseer — and I take advantage of that phrase deliberately,” stated Frye, who lives within the district’s Michigan Park neighborhood, which can be the place she grew up. “There was at all times this sense that D.C. couldn’t care for itself, this sense that it couldn’t rule itself, that was paternalistic and disrespectful. This narrative fed a stereotype about Black communities.”
Now, Frye and different residents say, that narrative could also be contributing to calls for to strip away a lot of the district’s capacity to manipulate itself.
As plans to raze Black Lives Matter Plaza — a mural in D.C. created after the homicide of George Floyd in 2020 — had been underway, U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee and U.S. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, each Republicans, launched laws to overturn the District of Columbia House Rule Act of 1973. Ogles stated in February that D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has left the capital in “shambles.”
Capital B reached out to Bowser for touch upon dwelling rule. Her workplace famous her earlier statements celebrating the House Rule Act and advocating for full D.C. statehood.
Many claims about crime within the district, municipal governance consultants argue, ignore how D.C.’s advanced legal authorized system — a results of its lack of actual autonomy — can impede efforts to forestall violence.
The demolition of a plaza that symbolized the nation’s “racial reckoning” 5 years in the past got here as a response to Republican threats to D.C.’s funding. It additionally adopted a marketing campaign cycle throughout which President Donald Trump used his platform to pledge a “federal takeover” of the district.
For greater than half a century, federal officers have empowered D.C. residents with what’s referred to as dwelling rule authority, which signifies that district voters can elect a neighborhood authorities, together with a mayor and a legislative physique. Congress nonetheless evaluations D.C.’s legal guidelines and has energy over its purse strings.
With out dwelling rule, the district could be run by federal lawmakers whom its roughly 700,000 residents by no means elected and who would seemingly have little incentive to answer infrastructure wants, public security considerations, or different challenges.
“In a rustic that prides itself on being the mannequin of what democracy ought to appear like, we sit in a district that doesn’t expertise democracy in the identical means,” stated Frye, who’s the president of the Nationwide Partnership for Ladies and Households, a nonprofit advocacy group. “No group is ideal. No set of leaders is ideal. Holding D.C. to an inconceivable normal in an try and rationalize why Congress nonetheless performs this position of decider doesn’t make plenty of sense.”
Race has at all times been a foremost character within the story of dwelling rule, in line with D.C. Councilmember Christina Henderson, 39. Throughout Reconstruction within the 1860s, white elites within the district insisted that having no autonomy could be higher than permitting Black males in D.C., who had simply gained the appropriate to vote, to affect native affairs.
“This historical past is tremendous essential,” stated Henderson, who has been an at-large councilmember since 2021. “White D.C. elites had been basically like, ‘We’re prepared to surrender our proper to vote if that signifies that no one has it. Take it from all people.’”
The struggle for dwelling rule, as we all know it at the moment, gained contemporary momentum within the Nineteen Sixties. The passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 shifted the political panorama, and inspired activists corresponding to Walter Fauntroy, a local Washingtonian, to register Black voters in districts the place they may tip congressional races. Organizers made positive that D.C.’s lack of political autonomy was an animating challenge in elections throughout the South.
Thanks to those efforts, newly enfranchised Black voters in 1972 had been capable of oust U.S. Rep. John McMillan of South Carolina, a Democrat and a segregationist who had been obstructing dwelling rule on the Home District Committee. With McMillan gone, the House Rule Act handed each homes of Congress, and President Richard Nixon — who had no need to oversee D.C.’s affairs — signed it into legislation.
In response to the present-day menace to dwelling rule, many residents are talking up, focusing their consideration on preserving not less than a point of autonomy in D.C.
On a latest Saturday within the basement of St. Martin of Excursions Church within the district’s Bloomingdale neighborhood, residents participated in “Group Artwork Construct Day,” an occasion hosted by Free DC, a motion that seeks to teach residents on an array of points, together with dwelling rule.
For Alex Lewis, the day was a chance to determine group at a time when dwelling rule is extra susceptible than ever. The Lexington, Mississippi, native moved to the district round 5 years in the past, drawn to its range — whereas D.C. hasn’t been majority Black since 2011, it’s nonetheless almost 45% Black — and the ubiquity of political organizing right here.
“It’s nice that there are issues like this. It makes me really feel much less hopeless and fewer alone,” Lewis, 27, stated. “It makes me really feel like there’s one thing I can do.”
Contained in the church, music pulsed from the audio system: “Cease! Within the Title of Love” by The Supremes, “Let’s Keep Collectively” by Al Inexperienced, “I’ll Be There” by The Jackson 5. Youngsters and adults adorned posters as they ate slices of pizza. And, later, some walked across the block to hold up their paintings, emblazoned with messages corresponding to “Hold D.C. free!” and “D.C.’s staff are stunning!”
The occasion additionally was an try and mitigate among the unease felt by residents throughout the broader D.C. area — which incorporates elements of Maryland and Northern Virginia — because the administration guts the federal workforce. Till this yr, Black households considered a “good authorities job” as a ticket to the center class (Frye’s father was within the U.S. Air Drive, and her mom labored on the Library of Congress). Now, that entry is caught within the crosshairs of Trump’s battle on range.
Free DC has been internet hosting frequent conferences and trainings all through the district’s eight wards — often within the evenings at a public library — to boost consciousness of the uncertainties forward and to show residents in regards to the position of protest and nonviolent motion in advancing civil rights targets.
House rule’s murky future
It’s straightforward, 49-year-old George Derek Musgrove stated, for D.C. residents his age and youthful to take dwelling rule as a right: They don’t know life with out it. The Baltimore native arrived within the district in 1994 and was out and in till 2005, when he got here to remain.
However there’s by no means been as a lot unanimity inside a single political get together round eliminating dwelling rule as there may be within the present Republican Social gathering, stated Musgrove, who’s a historical past professor on the College of Maryland, Baltimore County. He’s additionally the co-author of the 2017 guide, Chocolate Metropolis, A Historical past of Race and Democracy within the Nation’s Capital.
“Going into the 2024 presidential election, you had Undertaking 2025 speaking about eliminating dwelling rule. You had Trump speaking about taking on D.C. and cleansing it up — no matter that meant, however actually a curtailment of dwelling rule,” Musgrove stated. “You had laws, sponsored by Republicans, that may eliminate dwelling rule. Even when it isn’t critical — it doesn’t create a substitute governing construction — we all know that the GOP, below MAGA management, may very properly do it.”
And if Trump and his associates intestine dwelling position, residents would doubtless should depend on a congressperson who’s not answerable to them to handle their on a regular basis points.
“In case you’re asking individuals who have completely no purpose to look out to your greatest pursuits to look out to your greatest pursuits, that’s a recipe for actually horrible governance,” Musgrove added. “The job of being a neighborhood legislature would clearly be subverted to the duties that they should the individuals who really elect them.”
Henderson underscored that, no matter whether or not Democrats or Republicans are in energy, her message is similar.
“D.C. isn’t a federal company. We function as a metropolis, a county, a state, and a federal district,” she stated. “And there are 700,000 folks right here who’re attempting to reside out the American dream, identical to all people else. It’s our accountability to make sure that we’re offering providers to residents of the district which might be past what the federal authorities is ready to do, identical to different jurisdictions: trash pickup, public colleges, site visitors enforcement, all these issues.”
Residents aren’t taking the menace to dwelling rule mendacity down, even when — as Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s nonvoting consultant to Congress, put it to WUSA in February — many really feel overwhelmed. They’re mobilizing, emphasizing the perils going through the district.
Capital B reached out to Norton in regards to the challenge of dwelling rule. Her workplace didn’t reply to a request for an interview.
“Some individuals are gripped by hopelessness proper now, so Free DC features as a joy-driven motion that builds noncompliance and creates occasions to boost consciousness and enact change,” 32-year-old Shaila Huq, a Free DC chief, stated, pointing to the latest Group Artwork Construct Day for example of this organizing.
It was essential, she defined, to supercharge folks’s creativity — to provide them one thing to do the place there’s each path and autonomy — after which present a transparent connection between creating artwork and utilizing that artwork to disrupt.
“The equation isn’t actually full till you determine what you’re going to do together with your protest artwork,” stated Huq, who has lived in D.C. since 2015. “What’s your purpose? What message are you attempting to get throughout? For us, we’re attempting to activate that fireside in your abdomen, to make folks sit up and say, ‘What they’re attempting to do to the district is fallacious.’”
Residents will proceed organizing within the weeks forward, as Free DC hosts workshops and different occasions to encourage folks not solely to struggle for the little bit of autonomy that the district has received however to push for full self-governance.
This is also a second when residents corresponding to Frye, within the Michigan Park neighborhood, hope that the remainder of the nation will study and at last perceive that D.C. is as sophisticated, imperfect, and deserving of respect as some other jurisdiction.
“There are individuals who come right here and know nothing in regards to the nuances. They simply harp on one or two issues,” she stated. “However I am right here for a purpose. I really like D.C. There’s no different metropolis I’d quite reside in. Can it’s higher? Completely. Are we good? Most assuredly not. There are many issues that might be fastened. However plenty of the narrative is disingenuous. And it’s not like you may’t go to different cities and discover issues.”
