I first met Ms. Holmes when I was a student at Bell in 1992. I participated in her art competition ("each spring, the Congressional Institute sponsors a nationwide high school visual art competition
to recognize and encourage artistic talent in the nation and in each
congressional district. Since the Artistic Discovery competition began
in 1982, more than 650,000 high school students have participated") from 1992 - 1993.
"Eleanor K. Holmes was born in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Vela (née Lynch), a schoolteacher, and Coleman Holmes, a civil servant. While a student at Dunbar High School she was elected junior class president and was a member of the National Honor Society.She attended Antioch College (B.A. 1960), Yale University (M.A. in American Studies 1963)[ and Yale Law School (LL.B. 1964).
While in college and graduate school, she was active in the civil rights movement and an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. By the time she graduated from Antioch, she had already been arrested for organizing and participating in sit-ins in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Ohio. While in law school, she traveled to Mississippi for the Mississippi Freedom Summer and worked with civil rights stalwarts such as Medgar Evers. Her first encounter with a recently released but physically beaten Fannie Lou Hamer forced her to bear witness to the intensity of violence and Jim Crow repression in the South. Her time with the SNCC inspired her lifelong commitment to social activism and her budding sense of feminism. She contributed the piece "For Sadie and Maud" to the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women's Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan.Norton was on the founding advisory board of the Women's Rights Law Reporter (founded 1970), the first legal periodical in the United States to focus exclusively on the field of women's rights law. In the early 1970s, Norton was a signer of the Black Woman's Manifesto, a classic document of the Black feminist movement." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleanor_Holmes_Norton