A Civil-Rights Icon Urges Law Grads to Defend Free Speech
Eleanor Holmes Norton used a commencement address at Georgetown to argue that securing positive, lasting change in America requires letting all sides have their say.
This month the graduating class at Georgetown Law School marked commencement with a speech by non-voting D.C. Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton, whose résumé is as impressive as any in the House of Representatives.
Born in 1937, Norton received a masters in American studies and a law degree at Yale and traveled to the South for the Mississippi Freedom Summer as an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. After clerking for a federal judge, she became the assistant legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. And in 1970, she represented 60 women in a that successfully forced the magazine to overturn its practice of barring women from reporter jobs.
