Print
Del. Norton honored
One of the AFT’s highest honors, the Bayard Rustin Human Rights Award, was presented to Eleanor Holmes Norton during the convention’s Human Rights Award luncheon.
Norton, the seven-term District of Columbia delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives, is a fearless champion for human rights and the rights of working Americans.
AFT executive vice president Nat LaCour, who introduced the congresswoman, detailed how Norton worked arm-in-arm with AFT president Sandra Feldman and with former AFT political director Rachelle Horowitz under Rustin, the legendary civil rights activist and a chief architect of the landmark 1963 March on Washington.
The award has special significance, Norton said, coming from a union of professionals that has, time and again, stood with her and other congressional progressives on such key issues as the struggle to win full representation in Congress for District of Columbia residents and the battle to adequately fund public education.
“The AFT has understood that to get teachers what they deserve, they must press to get children what they deserve, too,” Norton said. Nothing drives home that point more, she added, than the AFT’s steadfast opposition to efforts on Capitol Hill to foist unproven and destructive private school voucher schemes on D.C. schools.
Although the Bush administration and the congressional majority managed to push private school vouchers for the District of Columbia into law in the last session, aggressive lobbying by the AFT, combined with grass-roots opposition from city residents, helped ensure that the only way District vouchers became law was through backroom politics, veto threats and pressure on individual representatives to flip their votes.
“Because of the campaign you led,” Norton said, these voucher proponents “now know they’ll never be able to do that to the country at large. Thank you for standing tall and strong for the teachers in the country [and for] students and parents in the fight for a first-rate education” for all.
