When a president fought for D.C. home rule, with help from MLK

Sixty years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. recognized the disenfranchisement of Washingtonians as a civil rights issue.

By Frederic J. Frommer

Six decades before hundreds of people marched to the White House to protest President Donald Trump’s crackdown on Washington, D.C., the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led thousands of demonstrators at the White House to urge home rule for the nation’s capital.

But, unlike today, when Washingtonians are worried about a president chipping away at home rule by taking over the D.C. police and sending federal law enforcement officers and the National Guard into the city, the U.S. president at the time, Lyndon B. Johnson, was a champion of home rule.

“Late tonight, Dr. King led a demonstration of several thousand persons to the White House to thank Mr. Johnson for his support of pending legislation to give the capital city home rule,” the New York Times reported In August 1965—60 years ago this month. “Dr. King told the crowd that if Congress did not act on the legislation, now pending in the House, in the next two or three weeks, he would urge demonstrators to come here from all parts of the nation to protest the lack of action.” (King had met with LBJ at the White House for an hour earlier that day.)

In fact, it would be eight more years before the city would get home rule, when President Richard Nixon signed legislation giving local residents limited authority over their own affairs for the first time in a century. When King made his plea in ’65, the Senate had just passed a bill granting home rule to Washington, but Southerners blocked the measure in the House.

The day before the march to the White House, King pointedly said, “You don't have freedom in Washington because you can't vote” outside of federal elections. D.C. residents had only recently won the right to vote in national elections, with passage of the 23rd Amendment in 1961.

“If you don't know why they don't want you to vote, I'll tell you,” King said. “It's because the District of Columbia is 55 to 60 percent Negro, and they know you will elect some Negroes to high public office."

He identified Southern House members as the roadblock and urged Black Washingtonians to wage an "all-out nonviolent movement for home rule.”

The same day, Johnson sent a message to House Speaker John W. McCormack, a Massachusetts Democrat, urging passage of the home rule bill.

The Times reported that King, on his visit to D.C. and its Virginia suburbs, was subjected to bomb threats and Nazi pickets. At a junior high school, the Nazis held signs that read, “America for whites. Africa for blacks.”

Later that month, LBJ warned that if D.C.’s residents weren’t treated fairly, the city could see the kinds of riots that afflicted the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts that summer.

“Those of you here in the District of Columbia,” the president said at a bill-signing ceremony, “I want to warn you this morning, that the clock is ticking, time is moving, that we should and we must ask ourselves every night when we go home: Are we doing all that we should do in our nation's capital, in all the other big cities of the country where 80 percent of the population of this country is going to be living in the year 2000?”

Johnson's domestic policy chief, Joseph A. Califano Jr., wrote in his memoir, “Even before the disturbance in Wats during the summer of 1965, LBJ was worried about racial violence in the nation’s capital.… From his election in 1964 he had sought self-government for the District.”

But LBJ had to settle for a law that created a presidentially appointed mayor and council starting in 1967, which led to Walter Washington becoming the first Black mayor of a major U.S. city. “The people of Washington are about as franchised as I can get them,” he told Califano.

Way back in 1948, President Harry Truman had called for D.C. home rule in an ahead-of-its-time civil rights package. But it wasn’t until House District Committee Chairman John McMillan, a South Carolina Democrat, lost his reelection bid in 1972 that the path for a home rule bill was cleared. A bitter McMillan blamed his defeat on Black voters. “The colored people were bought out,” he said.

A year later, Congress finally passed the home rule bill. Nixon, who had supported Truman’s home rule effort as a freshman Republican California congressman, signed it into law on Christmas Eve 1973.

“As the nation approaches the 200th anniversary of its founding, it is particularly appropriate to assure those persons who live in our capital city rights and privileges which have long been enjoyed by most of their countrymen,” he said.

Frederic J. Frommer, a writer and sports and politics historian, has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, History.com and other national publications. A former Associated Press reporter, Frommer is the author of several books, including “You Gotta Have Heart: Washington Baseball from Walter Johnson to the 2019 World Series Champion Nationals." Follow him on X.

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