- When I say D.C., you say statehood.

Y'all got that?

- Yeah!

I want them over there to hear us.

I want them over there to hear us.

And I want the senator to hear us as well.

D.C. - Statehood!

- D.C. - Statehood!

(upbeat music) Not a lot of people know about D.C. statehood and what it actually means for residents of Washington.

We don't have any senators.

The District of Columbia has only me in the House, and I do not vote on the House floor.

No, I didn't know that.

No, I did not know.

I thought you guys were a state.

It doesn't make any sense to me.

- Woo!

- Woo!

America is literally unique on Earth in disenfranchising the people of its capital city and locking them out of their national legislature.

Imagine if France told the people of Paris that they couldn't be represented.

I mean, you'd have another French Revolution on your hands.

(crowd cheering) - Keep on clapping if you care about voting rights.

- [Crowd] Yeah.

Keep on clapping if you care about D.C. statehood.

(crowd cheers) D.C statehood is literally the most pressing civil rights issue of our lifetime.

- 51st State!

- 51st State!

The fight is really about becoming equal to other Americans.

- The gentlewoman yields.

- I will not yield, sir.

The District of Columbia has spent 206 years yielding To people who would deny them the vote, I yield you no ground.

(music) These are my Activist 101 shoes.

They're dress shoes, but they're also like shoes.

This oil is called "The Obama."

Makes you talk like Obama, feel like Obama.

All right, let's rock it.

Anywhere that I go, I do not miss a beat to talk about Washington D.C.

When you grow up somewhere that you call home, there's an identity that you hold onto about the city.

But all these people live here and come out their houses every day and then look at a Capital where they don't have representation.

- [Interviewer] What is 51 FOR 51?

51 FOR 51 is a statehood campaign focused on making D.C. the 51st State with 51 votes in the Senate.

It's a Black youth-led organization by young native Washingtonians who have been here but was raised without a vote.

- How old are you, may I ask?

- I am 23 years old.

I just got my braces off and everything.

(upbeat music) I don't do heights, Demi.

No, you need to stand.

(laughing) I'm trying to.

My leg is shaking.

I'm right here on the edge of this.

I was born and raised in D.C.

I met Jamal at the Marion Barry Youth Leadership Program.

When Jamal walked in the room, he had a bow tie on and a full-blown suit in the summer as like a 13, 14-year-old.

It was odd, but it was like, he's serious.

When he spoke, he could relate to everyone.

Everyone respected him, and you could feel that he truly cared what he was talking about.

Jamal called me and said 51 FOR 51 was organizing around the statehood issue.

We wanted to get young, native Washingtonians, especially Black and Brown residents, to really describe the story of what it's like growing up in D.C. wanting to advocate for D.C. - We're committed to one goal and one mission.

And what's that?

- Statehood!

There we go.

(crowd cheers and applauds) We have to push those individuals, especially those Democrat senators who have not yet spoke on D.C. statehood.

And we will not be silenced anymore.

We will not be treated as second-class citizens.

And we deserve to be a part of the political process.

Every year that I pay taxes, I just be like, "Really?"

Really?

I'm gonna do this?

And I don't get no say-so or nothing?

And you know I got a lot of say-so.

(Jamal laughs) This is our year.

We're gonna get it done.

(upbeat music) The founding fathers said, "Ok, we just fought a war, "literally risked our own lives for the principle "of no taxation without representation."

So how do we balance them?

James Madison, he says, "Look, "whatever states cede the land for the national capital, "they will, of course, figure out "how these people have representation "in the local legislature and in the Congress."

But they don't.

Maryland and Virginia cede the land for the national capital.

And they create no mechanism for making sure the people that are in the district have representation in Congress.

D.C. is unlike every state that raises their own local taxes: write a budget, pass it, and then they send it up to Congress.

And if Congress wants to, they can change it, they can flat out reject it.

So we can pass laws all the time and we can't implement them.

Congress gets to control everything.

The difference between D.C. and some of the other territories that don't have congressional representation or only have non-voting representation, so Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, they don't pay federal taxes.

But this is the one place where you have taxation and a lack of representation.

(ambient music) I was raised up in this house.

[Jamal] We all were.

Yeah, me and my kids.

It was five of us.

Ayden, give her the umbrella.

Let me see.

Ayden!

This is Southeast, Ward 8.

D.C.'s most low-income ward, majority Black population.

Marion Barry, who is a "Mayor for Life," and many other good people come out of Ward 8.

The age of 16 changed my entire life.

I always knew that I wanted to serve in some sort of way.

At the age of 16, I got into the program to train young people around the importance of civic engagement.

This was me in 10th grade.

Growing up, like my mom wasn't well off.

She relied on many jobs.

And she didn't have access to good healthcare.

I was a single mom.

The school used to ask me, "We need health records.

"We need health insurance cards."

And I was like, "I don't have any."

(audience applauds) Thank you.

When President Obama made the call to call your representatives, call your senator and tell them to vote for the Affordable Care Act, it was personal for me.

That was like a act that allowed me and my family to get healthcare that I couldn't advocate, or have a voice, or a vote I felt left out of democracy.

And that's where my fight for statehood came.

Because D.C. is a majority Black and Brown place, it's easy to disenfranchise a group of people that have been disenfranchised for the entire history of this country.

(intense music) There's no question that race is one of the principal concerns of people who are discussing governance of the District of Columbia.

You've got crappy schools.

Your schools are not only dropout factories, they're inmate factories.

Every argument that we've heard in this fight was all racist dog whistles around what this fight is truly about.

Yes, Wyoming is smaller than Washington by population, but Wyoming is a well-rounded, working class state.

[Mondaire] I have had enough of my colleague's racist insinuations that somehow the people of Washington D.C. are incapable or even unworthy of our democracy.

The tricky part politically is that it's all wrapped up with all of these other conservative versus liberal issues.

Democrats want to make Washington a state because they want two new Democratic senators in perpetuity.

It's not about the city.

It's not about the people in the city.

It's about a power grab.

Republicans say, "Well, it's a power grab.

"They're trying to unbalance a balanced political system."

What's really happening is that Democrats are trying to better balance an unbalanced political system.

It's just balanced in the favor of rural, predominantly white, Republican jurisdictions today.

People sort of don't think about it as a voting rights issue, but it very much is.

As our country becomes more and more diverse, that diversity is sort of unevenly spread across our country.

But our democracy, specifically in the Senate, gives more power to smaller, whiter, redder states.

And Democrats say, Look, one of the ways out of this structural imbalance is to back D.C. statehood.

(music) The history of statehood is people petition for statehood and get admitted to the Union.

Each one of the states seeking admission has faced arguments that it's somehow inferior.

Some places they've said are too poor or they're too far away.

Hawaii and Alaska, they're not contiguous.

Texas was its own republic, so how can you admit a foreign country?

In every case, the objections to statehood have been overcome because of the imperative of democratic representation.

When you hear those arguments that D.C. doesn't have real people that live there, and they're just a bunch of diplomats and bureaucrats.

By far, the largest group of workers in the city are bureaucrats and other white-collar professionals.

Senators and congressmen, in fact, most of the time get out of this city, go out to where the real people are at across our country and ask them what they think.

That's a threat to me.

That's a threat to my mom.

That's a threat to my family.

It's offensive.

Hey.

Come on in.

Hey, hey, everybody.

How we doing?

What's up, everybody?

(people greeting one another) (music) I was actually quite surprised.

Thank you.

We've all grown up in Southeast, besides my kids.

We are all native Washingtonians.

My granddad lived right there on the corner.

You could still smell it a little bit from the Wonder Bread factory that was right across the street from here.

We stayed on this street, played hopscotch, Double-Dutch, kickball.

You had the go-go scene, which was right up the road.

We went to the nightclub up there, The Black Hole.

(music) Everybody ready?

All right, listen up.

Listen up, everybody; listen up.

Listen up, listen up.

Here we go.

Couple of things, couple of things, couple of things I wanna say.

(family members chatter) (music) ♪ Let's have a block party ♪ Let's have a barbecue I think we all played a role in the statehood movement.

You were like one of the founding fathers of the statehood movement.

Not necessarily a founding father, but I was probably 20 years out.

You still living.

A great nephew.

A great nephew, yeah.

In the '90s, '93 was our first vote on statehood.

And that was the year you were born, yeah.

That's how old this pin is on my shoulder, as old as you.

The important acknowledgement now though is that the D.C. statehood movement while it's become kind of this populist issue in D.C. was really rooted in Black activism, right?

That if it wasn't for the Free D.C. Movement in the '60s or for the Statehood Convention in the '80s or, right, for the failed vote in the '90s or, that we wouldn't be at this moment.

Where we are today with Jamal and 51 FOR 51.

The cycle is about full self-determination.

For the first time, we got it passed through the House and, you know, a hair away from passage in the Senate.

That's huge.

Is there actually a possibility now?

I think there is a possibility, but I still have doubt.

You know, Dems have a person just holding them up.

But I do love the approach of this new generation and the fire that you all come with.

You know, I hope that 2021 is the end of us struggling for our full self-determination.

But if this isn't, then we gotta really- I know that if it isn't, it's going be it.

It's going to be the last generation.

Lawmakers have passed 30 bills to stop people from voting.

As a 13-year-old and an activist, here's my question to elected officials.

Why are you in office?

(crowd cheering in agreement) Are you here for power?

Or are you here to use your platform for good?

(audience cheering in agreement) There are over 400 voter suppression laws happening in our country, including one of those right here in the District of Columbia suppressing Black and Brown people from their voter representation and their democracy.

So if we're gonna preach democracy, then we must practice democracy.

What do we want?

- Voting rights.

- When do we want it?

- Now.

- What do we want?

- Voting rights.

- When do we want it?

- Now.

(music) 51 FOR 51 was focused on building a national coalition that advocated for statehood, but specifically achieving it through 51 votes.

There's a number of volunteer-based organizations that have been in existence forever working on statehood.

And then there are chapters of national organizations.

League of Women Voters, for example, is huge.

D.C. Vote has always been focusing on voting rights for the district.

What 51 FOR 51 is essentially doing is saying, "You know, Democrats, this is a national issue.

"It matters to you in California.

"It matters to you in Vermont.

"And so, take a stand on it."

The idea was that during presidential elections, none of these presidential candidates are gonna come to D.C. Let's meet them where they're going.

We traveled across the entire country talking to presidential candidates.

Strategically, it was just very in your face.

We know that you support D.C. statehood.

Always have.

So we wanna know if you support D.C. becoming the 51st state with 51 votes in the Senate?

Absolutely.

(crowd cheering) Do you believe that 51 votes is enough to affirm full voting rights for the residents of Washington D.C. and for their 700,000 residents?

Yeah, you know, I do.

51 FOR 51 did an amazing job of bird-dogging every single one of the presidential candidates.

[Demi] We were trying to get Joe Biden to say he supported statehood outright.

- Do you support D.C. becoming the 51st state with 51 votes?

- Absolutely, I have for the last 28 years.

- With 51 votes in the Senate?

- Yes.

The last time a piece of statehood legislation came up before Congress was a vote in the House of Representatives in 1993.

[Protesters] Statehood.

- When do we want it?

- Now.

The Democrats were roughly split.

About 150 Democrats voted for it, but 105 Democrats voted against it.

Today, that's fundamentally different.

Democrats have really unified behind D.C. statehood as a legitimate policy goal of the party.

I was therefore able to get this statehood bill passed in the House and to get a Senate hearing.

(peaceful ambient music) - Is this what democracy looks like?

- [Crowd] This is what democracy looks like.

There are three bills going through Congress right now, all of them dealing with democracy repair.

The three together really do, in fact, fix what has become wrong with our democracy and get us back closer to the ideals that everyone has a voice.

We're here because we believe in our democracy and we are willing to fight for it.

- That's right.

(crowd cheering) - Are you ready to pass voting rights no matter what?

- Yeah.

(crowd cheering) We have got to pass the For the People Act to ensure that our democracy works across the country.

And then we have to follow it by passing S4 and most importantly, to me anyway, D.C. statehood through S51 to ensure that For the People is for all of the people, (crowd cheering and applauding) all 700,000 of us who choose to live here in the District of Columbia.

(music) We got buses coming in from everywhere, but Washington needed to be there big time.

Because one of the biggest abuses of voter suppression is not having representation here in the District of Columbus.

(crowd applauding and cheering) To have us fighting all over the world for democracy.

We talking about democracy in Afghanistan and not talking about it in the District.

But we've gotta figure out how to galvanize the consciousness of our nation.

And my dad and mom taught us that it only takes a few good women and men to bring about change.

(crowd cheering and applauding) (upbeat music) We cannot leave out the people of Washington D.C. when we're talking about voting rights and voting representation.

So that's what the power of this march is about.

It's about demanding voting rights, but also demanding D.C. statehood and ensuring we're not leaving D.C. residents out of the fight for democracy.

(upbeat music) (crowd cheering) Jamal and I stand here on this stage the next and hopefully last generation to carry the torch of statehood, to send the message to America, the Senate and the president.

Our freedom will not be overlooked any longer.

- That's right.

(crowd cheering and applauding) To stand before the Capitol, a so-called beacon of democracy that was built on the back of enslaved people, to deny Black and Brown residents their right to vote, that's at its heart disenfranchisement.

(crowd applauding and cheering) - No justice.

- No peace.

- No justice.

- No peace.

- What do we want?

- Voting rights.

- When do we want it?

- Now.

- Protect your power.

- Protect your power.

- Protect your power.

- Protect your power.

In the midst of all of this success, there is a furious backlash going on right now.

Republican-controlled states are passing a slew of voter-suppression legislation.

And so, HR1, HR51, if they're not passed, I worry that if we don't do it this time, we may not be able to do it in the near future.

(music) The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land.

What Congress cannot do is override the Constitution anytime it becomes inconvenient.

The Constitution endures.

And that is the fundamental premise of our democratic republic.

And I fear that that premise is being threatened by this legislation.

- No it's not.

All of those things that are raised as objections are actually not in the Constitution.

The Constitution permits this.

And the vision of representative government requires it.

We know that ending taxation without representation was a principle that led to the independence of our nation.

And it's a glaring contradiction of our democracy.

And we know the time to correct that wrong is now.

In my mind, this shouldn't be viewed as a partisan issue in any way.

And with that, this hearing is now adjourned.

Thank you.

(gavel bangs) (music) - [Jamal] There you have it.

(music) And I thought we were there.

And to see that thing fall is just like, it's heartbreaking.

It makes you realize who is really for your fight and who isn't.

It crushed me.

[Demi] We have a Democrat in office as our president that said that he supports it.

We have full control of Congress at this point.

And nothing happened.

[Stasha] I think what it said to a lot of people is that our democracy is structurally broken on so many levels.

(ambient music) Two years ago, I literally thought that it was the work of what we were doing in that moment that was gonna achieve us statehood within that year.

Right?

Do you know how hopeless it feels to sort of feel like you shifted the narrative on how people are talking about statehood.

I thought we were gonna get this shit done.

Like we were closer than ever.

And now, we're back to square one.

Yeah.

You know?

[Markus] Yeah.

Because you wanna know the one thing that I heard from every senator, even Democrats in Congress, was, "My residents aren't talking about it."

You always kind of see this one step forward, half step back.

But 51 FOR 51 did achieve the narrative changing goals.

And I'll be honest.

After 43 years, you know, Jamal, you joke about it, about me saying, "I'm over this thing."

Sometimes, it's hard.

The question for folks like you and this generation and every succeeding generation, what are you going to do to build upon the foundation that has been laid?

[Jamal] Here's the car right there.

I was recently elected as President of the Young Democrats in D.C. where I represent Democrats that are under the age of 36.

I think this is the first time the Mayor has ever sort of attended a Young Dems event.

So I'm a bit nervous about that.

It's showtime.

(upbeat music) How are you?

(upbeat music) (indistinct chatter) The mayor's en route.

So I wanna start (indistinct) these people downstairs for when she speaks.

- Okay.

(upbeat music) - Thank you.

Hey, how are you?

- How are you?

- Hello, beautiful.

Good to see you.

How are you?

Your pin is upside down.

Let's fix that.

Now we're the right D.C.

Thank you so much.

You're doing an awesome job.

Well, you know, I'm trying hard.

Yes, you are.

And now, I'm glad we got a little army of young people.

I wanna introduce myself.

My name is Jamal Holtz, and I serve as President of D.C. Young Democrats.

(crowd cheering and applauding) In fact, the first Gen Z President of D.C. Young Democrats.

(crowd cheering) This generation will be the last generation to have to experience what it means to not be a state.

(crowd cheering) This generation will be the last generation to have to experience what it means to not have a vote in their democracy.

Without further ado, I now wanna give a round of applause for Mayor Muriel Bowser.

(crowd applauding and cheering) Well, thank you Jamal.

Good evening, Democrats.

- Good evening.

We are always going to fight for D.C. statehood.

- [Audience Member] That's right.

(crowd applauding and cheering) So I hope that the Young Democrats take very seriously your job of educating the electorate but also preparing people to take my place.

I am counting on you to take us to the next level.

(crowd cheering and applauding) I don't know, Mayor.

You just increased my goal of running for mayor in less than 10 years now.

(crowd applauding and cheering) ♪ Welcome to DC ♪ You know where you're at ♪ The USA Cap ♪ You're taking this lightly ♪ Stop taking this lightly ♪ Now how you gone act ♪ Oh you gone be right back ♪ Well we will be right here ♪ We will be right here ♪ We ain't going nowhere ♪ Welcome to DC ♪ DC, the home of Chuck Brown ♪ Oh you don't know the sound ♪ Well let me break it down ♪ The G-O, the G-O ♪ The M-A-M-B-O ♪ Welcome to DC ♪ Welcome to DC