D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton often talks about how her great-grandfather, Richard Holmes, walked out of Virginia into the District. He was a runaway slave. He arrived in the city nine months before President Abraham Lincoln ended slavery in the nation’s capital.

Last week, when the U.S. House of Representatives passed Resolution 194, apologizing to African-Americans for slavery and the injustices of Jim Crow laws and pledging to prevent “human rights violations in the future,” I thought of Holmes and my own family’s history.