Name: Carol Grigsby 

Occupation: Retired from USAID; Writer and Disability Advocate 

Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee // Washington, DC 

Tell me a little bit about yourself. How long have you lived in DC?

It’s hard to believe, but I've lived here for almost fifty years now — forty eight years to be exact. I came here for graduate school in 1978 to attend the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), which used to be on Massachusetts Avenue. I was interested in international affairs and came to DC pretty much expecting to stay in the area. It’s also where I met my husband, and we then settled in DC and bought our home in 1986, so I’ve been a homeowner here since then. 

Why did you decide to move to DC?

I was really interested in international affairs and I had just moved back here from Paris, where I had spent two years after graduating from college. I really wanted to work for the government, not unlike a lot of people, certainly in that era, who came to Washington wanting to do good in the world and to work for the government to help make that happen. I had also applied to the Tufts [University] Fletcher School, but I preferred SAIS because I wanted to actually be in DC. 

What do you love most about living in DC?

It’s such a vibrant and energetic place, and very diverse, which I think is  important — I just love the energy level. I also love the fact that where I live, it’s very walkable —  a lot of DC is very walkable, although that’s not so typical for the whole of the United States. I don’t have to get in the car to go places. There’s great mass transit. I can go shop for groceries or run out to get a bite within a short walk of home. I just think that’s a tremendous advantage, it makes life so calm and enjoyable. 

And there’s a real sense of community in my neighborhood, which is around the Tenleytown area. I also think there’s a solid sense of community in DC generally — maybe because we know we’re sort of all in it together and dealing with a lot of federal interference in our day-to-day lives. So we have to keep a stiff upper lip about it and work together to solve problems. 

Could you talk about your own experience being disenfranchised, or in other words, what it has been like to lose the rights you had when you were living in one of the 50 states?

I moved here not that long after we got Home Rule. I was aware of that at the time as an important step for DC, but I thought of it as sort of a way station — I believed that we were on our way to something better fairly soon. I probably didn’t fully appreciate the amount of struggle that had gone into achieving that, since I didn’t know that much about the history of DC before then.  And, to be really honest, after graduating from SAIS I was working for the federal government, and I was very focused on work, I was traveling a lot, and didn’t give my disenfranchisement an immense amount of thought. I did know that every time I went to vote, I didn’t have as much say as I would have if I was living in one of the states. I even remember when we were buying our house, we were originally looking in the Maryland suburbs, in part because I knew we’d have better representation. But once we decided to live in DC instead, I just sort of got more focused on the job, I think. It became just a frustration in the background. 

There were other things that started happening later in life that made me feel a lot more rooted here. One of those is that I have a son who has a disability, and we had to work to get him his supports — first, while he was in school, but then later, when he was going to get out of school and be an adult here, we had to think about how he’d get his long-term services. That was somewhat instrumental in my decision to retire when I did. I got very engaged in advocacy, not just for my son, but in broader advocacy on the disability front here in DC. That meant I was working a lot more with other local advocates and with the DC government, which I hadn’t really been that involved with before, beyond paying taxes and getting the trash picked up. At this point I gained a much better appreciation of DC, our local government, the structure, and all that we were up against. Ever since then, that consciousness has increased in my mind, about just how disadvantaged we are. I’ve focused more on  current events and the history of DC, and read a lot more  — for example, Chocolate City, which is just a fabulous book, and really puts DC’s history and current situation into context. 

What does achieving statehood mean for you?

It really means having the rest of the country recognize that we’re real Americans. Having them realize that there are 700,000 people who live here who don’t have anybody representing them with a vote in the Congress, and that we’re constantly being acted on by people who don’t view us as their constituents at all. It would mean that our country would reach a new level in terms of civil rights, because the history of DC is so tied up with slavery and racism, and there’s so much that happens now, in a much more veiled way, that is really about others thinking it’s a city of Black people and we don’t have to care. No one would admit to that, but it’s just a reality in DC’s history. 

I’ve been writing a blog for a long time about local disability issues in DC, but last year I started writing a weekly Substack called “DC Lives,” which is my contribution to trying to educate people outside the DMV about what it really means to live here, and what DC is really about in a day-to-day way. It’s my effort to raise people’s consciousness. 

What do you think needs to be done to get closer to achieving statehood?  

So many people have given that so much thought. Speaking personally, what I’ve decided I can do is to write this Substack and try to educate people back in my home state of Tennessee and elsewhere. Beyond that, I think there’s too much of a habit on the part of DC residents — though not all — to not want to get obnoxious about it with other people. You know, to kind of toss it off — ‘well we all know we don’t have representation.’ I think we need to be a lot louder and more determined about it. I want to be a lot more vocal about our lack of rights and have people not just think it’s an interesting footnote about U.S. politics. I even think there’s too much of a habit within the DMV, and even on the part of some DC residents, to engage in facile putdowns of the DC government or DC in general, and that has started to really bother me. I probably did it myself decades ago, but now I say to people ‘I don’t know why you say that, what do you mean by that?’ because I think we need to get folks to really think about what they’re saying. 

Also, as I’ve read more about what came before Home Rule, I look at what Walter Fauntroy did, and others I’m sure who were working with him: they went to the home districts of people who were voting against DC rights — there was a particular one, it was Rep. McMillan of South Carolina, I think — and they went to his home district and started to stir people up, not just stir people up about DC, but to stir up Black voters to get them to turn out and turn him out of office, and they succeeded. And he was a major blockage against DC Home Rule at the time. It takes a tremendous amount of organization, but I think that the more DC folks can get out there and get into the districts where our greatest opponents in Congress come from, I think that will, over time, help. I have to believe. One of the reasons I’m more interested in being active with the League than the more overtly partisan groups is that it’s important for people to not see DC Statehood as a partisan issue — it’s an American issue.

Is there anything else you would like to say? 

We’re in a political cycle right now that I think makes the idea of progress kind of bleak. But, a cycle is a cycle, so it will come back around again. That was sort of my thinking in starting my Substack too — I’m trying to lay the groundwork for when the wheel turns and people are ready to think in terms of moving forward again. At that point, hopefully, folks will go ‘Oh wow, I’ve learned something, maybe it’s time to move on this.’ 

I’ve read a fair amount of Jill Lepore on the U.S. Constitution and she talks about the fact that Americans have become sort of unwilling to amend the Constitution. Now I’m not saying that it’s necessary to amend the Constitution to get DC Statehood, but I think what she talks about is a symptom — that we’re kind of stuck in this place where our country is just where it is, and even if we’re not exactly where we need to be, many people are satisfied enough not to do anything else, not to make any more major improvements. That wheel will turn, and when it does, I want DC Statehood to be very much on the map and in front of people as one of the things that has to change. 

[this interview was conducted in February 2026]