On the recordApril 15, 2015
In advance of D.C. Emancipation Day, and I know that it is not a national holiday, but it is, yes, a holiday in the District of Columbia. It commemorates the day when the slaves in the District of Columbia were liberated by the Congress and Abraham Lincoln 9 months before the national Emancipation Proclamation. Astonishingly, 150 years later, full freedom and equal citizenship have not yet come to the residents of the District of Columbia. You don't have to be the Holmes family in the District of Columbia, who have lived three generations here paying taxes without representation. Indeed, my great grandfather, Richard Holmes, was a runaway slave from Virginia. When Lincoln and Congress freed the slaves 150 years ago, Richard Holmes was not freed, because he was a runaway slave rather than a slave whose master lived in the District of Columbia. So he had to wait the 9 months for the Emancipation Proclamation, but he was working on the streets of Washington like a free man as they were building Washington. He became free, but his great granddaughter--grateful for all that my family has done--cannot say that we are free today. The greater shock will not come from those of us who are longtime residents. It will come from those who moved to D.C. yesterday, from those who are not three generations here but who are one day here, when they find that their rights are gone, that the rights they had in every State of the Union have vanished except for a few.…
