So the last intro draft has been moved to my “Contribution to the Field” section. Here’s the new intro:

While the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ensured that African-Americans would have the right to vote granted by the Fifteenth Amendment, this legislation did little for the voting prospects of the residents of the District of Columbia. Denied the right to elect their own local government or representatives to the U.S. Congress, Washingtonians of all races had only been allowed to vote for president the previous year, in the first presidential election since Congress passed the Twenty-Third Amendment. Although Washington had long been home to active movements for legislative autonomy from Congress and African-American civil rights, these movements remained largely separate until the District became a majority-minority city in the 1950s. Despite early civil rights successes in the 1940s and 1950s and agitation for District voting rights by national organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the desire for home rule remained largely unrealized until the late 1960s and early 1970s - after the alleged end of the civil rights movement. How did the city’s changing demographics and relationship with the national civil rights struggle impact the century-old battle for home rule and the city’s relationship with the U.S. Congress? How does the District of Columbia fit into the larger narrative of the black protest movement?

In the public mind, the civil rights movement exists as a phenomenon that revolutionized the still-rural U.S. South between 1954 and 1965, led by courageous and deeply moral men who confronted violent racism with nonviolence and civil disobedience, driven by their belief that the time for African-American rights had finally come. But in the last two decades, professional historians have begun to challenge this categorization, pushing the temporal, geographic, tactical, institutional and gendered boundaries of the traditionally drawn movement. Long civil rights scholars such as Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Peniel Joseph and Martha Biondi have all explored black freedom struggles outside the South and before its rhetorically nonviolent battles for integration. Meanwhile, urban historians like Thomas Sugrue, Robert O. Self and Matthew Lassiter have re-injected black activism into the narrative of post-WWII urban growth. However, none of these works have addressed the central question of what these struggles for equality might mean in the nation’s capital, where its residents of all races have long been constitutionally denied the right to vote.

Despite much excellent work on relevant themes such as grassroots and cross-racial coalitions, the role of federal intervention, and the distinctiveness of Northern and Western movements, scholars examining the long civil rights movement and post WWII cities have not fully explored the District of Columbia and its century-old battle for voting rights. Yet without such an understanding, we are left with an inadequate analysis that ignores both the Mid-Atlantic region between North and South and the federal government’s remarkable power to decide who should have rights.

This study will remedy the gap in the literature by examining post-WWII racial politics in the District in order to more fully elucidate the city’s previously unrecognized relationships with national civil rights organizations and the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. This study will focus particularly on Washington in the years between 1945 and 1973, when the U.S. Congress finally granted residents some means to home rule. Through a close analysis of the role played by African-American activists in the District’s extended battle against Congress for voting rights, I will show that in contrast to previous assumptions about the exceptionality of the District, in fact the work of these activists should be considered one piece of the larger nationwide push for black political power.

The 23rd Amendment
S.J. Res. 39 of the 86th Congress
passed June 16, 1960, ratified March 29, 1961

“DC gets a school board”
District of Columbia Board of Education Act, Public Law 90-292, 82 Stat. 101
signed April 22, 1968 

Home Rule Act of 1973
District of Columbia Self-Government and Governmental Reorganization Act, P.L. 93-198
signed December 24, 1973