[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 61 (Wednesday, April 6, 2022)]
[House]
[Page H4198]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         VIRGIN ISLANDS HISTORY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Stanton). The Chair recognizes the 
gentlewoman from the Virgin Islands (Ms. Plaskett) for 5 minutes.
  Ms. PLASKETT. Mr. Speaker, the Virgin Islands and its people speak of 
great resilience. We are a people rich in history and agriculture, 
struggles and triumphs in the face of disenfranchisement.
  March 31, 2022, marked 104 years that the Virgin Islands of the 
United States have been part of the United States. Our islands were 
acquired by the United States in the costliest per-acre sale in U.S. 
land purchase. We became the most easterly point of the United States, 
and served to protect the Caribbean Basin and the Panama Canal, 
particularly during World War I.
  The sale of the Danish West Indies pulled Denmark out of depression 
and gave them the capital resources, gold bullion, necessary for them 
to become the happiest country that we know today. The brutal slavery 
and serf system that they inflicted on my ancestors, however, was not a 
happy time.
  During the transfer of ceremonies on March 31, 1917, the people of 
the Virgin Islands, my people, were citizens of no country. All four of 
my grandparents were alive and living on the island of St. Croix at the 
time of the transfer.
  Only qualified Danish citizens living in Denmark were able to vote in 
the plebiscite.

                              {time}  1045

  Of my eight great-grandparents, I believe one may have met the land 
and income requirement mandatory to be able to vote. Only one would 
have been able to vote for his destiny.
  And after the purchase, those living in the territory, my 
grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, my family, were 
citizens of no country, nowhere, for 10 years.
  Yet, after becoming citizens, Virgin Islanders came immediately to 
Washington and petitioned, pleaded to be part of the draft. You see, 
Virgin Islanders, like the other territories, serve and give the 
ultimate sacrifice in far greater number per capita than those 
Americans on the mainland. We wanted and still are willing to take on 
the responsibility, not just the privilege.
  Until the United States began ownership of territories, largely 
comprised of minority, Black and Brown people, disenfranchisement of 
territories was a temporary condition. From the 1787 Northwest 
Ordinance until the acquisition of Puerto Rico, lands were deemed 
territories with the expectation that they would become States.
  The disenfranchisement and unequal treatment of people in the Virgin 
Islands are de jure law. The Insular Cases decided at the turn of the 
century in the Plessy v. Ferguson-era by the Supreme Court, established 
a doctrine of separate and unequal status for overseas territories.
  However, the disenfranchisement and unequal treatment continues today 
through court cases in the Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden 
administration, through their oral and written arguments to the Supreme 
Court, as well as my own colleagues, Congress' unwillingness to grant 
equal treatment requests made by representatives from the territories.
  My fight in Washington has been to level and create equity, to 
counter the many ways that such disenfranchisement affects our lives, 
Federal funding, healthcare access, veterans' benefits, structural 
damage after natural disasters due to longstanding unequitable funding.
  It is my deepest honor to be grounded by my history, my parents, and 
my ancestors from the Virgin Islands, many of whom have played an 
integral role in the history of this Nation, long even before we were a 
part of this country; from Denmark Vesey, leader of the Charleston, 
South Carolina, slave revolt; David Levy Yulee, the first Jewish 
Senator in the United States; William Leidesdorff, the founder of San 
Francisco; Edward Wilmot Blyden, one of the founders of Liberia; even 
today, my predecessor, the first female physician of this body as a 
Member of Congress, Donna Christensen; and even this weekend, NCAA 
Women's Basketball Champion, Aliyah Boston.
  Our contributions to this Nation are undisputed, and 104 years after 
our transfer from Denmark to the U.S. possession, our claim to full and 
inviolable rights as citizens of this country are long overdue.

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