She Had Guts: Shirley Chisholm
Hanne BlankThe most important thing to know about the late Representative Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) is not that she was a Black woman who made a serious bid to become the Democratic party nominee for President in 1972. The most important thing to know about Shirley Chisholm is that she was a Black woman who made a serious bid to become the Democratic party nominee for President in 1972, and who openly and frankly accepted the endorsement and support of the Black Panthers.1
Think about it for a minute. At the time, the Black Panther Party was widely considered to be one of the most dangerous organizations in the country, associated with a string of high-profile criminal cases that included shootings, prison riots, alleged murder conspiracies, and more. The FBI’s COINTELPRO grimly identified them as a “black nationalist hate group.”2 To a politician less sure of herself, such an endorsement might have seemed a kiss of death.
But Shirley Chisholm had no time for the apologetic respectability politics that might have led a more cautious candidate to reject the BPP endorsement. Not only did she accept it, she explained it to the press: “What has happened to them [the Panthers] as an oppressed group in America, being used to the meaningless platforms and empty promises, has led them to come to the conclusion that perhaps with me there is hope.”3
Matter-of-fact and ferociously committed to the cause of a genuinely democratic politics, Chisholm, the daughter of immigrants from British Guiana and Barbados, first became a representative to the New York State Assembly in 1965, having become interested in politics during her early career as a pre-school educator and consultant to the New York City Division of Day Care. After winning her Congressional seat in 1968, Chisholm’s deep commitment to the vulnerable motivated her to help expand food stamps and push for the creation of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), as well as working tirelessly in the Committee for Veterans Affairs and the Education and Labor Committee.
Chisholm practiced what she preached about expanding access to government for historically oppressed groups: she hired only women for her Congressional office, half of them Black.4 She helped found the Congressional Black Caucus and the National Women’s Political Caucus. And, in a Brooklyn church in January of 1972, she announced her candidacy for President. A year later, in her book The Good Fight, she would make it clear that this, too, had the principles of enabling access to government at its core: she had not run for President “despite hopeless odds” because she thought she would win, but in order to break the glass ceiling, “because somebody had to do it first.”
Chisholm’s famous tagline, “Unbought and Unbossed,” telegraphed her trademark forthrightness as well as her integrity. She was unabashed about discussing sex, race, and how they affected her political life, saying “I’ve always met more discrimination being a woman than being black …. When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men.”5 The Black community was not necessarily more supportive, and Chisholm openly aired her frustration with being expected to perform the “black matriarch thing” with a reporter from the Associated Press, saying “The black man must step forward, but that doesn’t mean the black woman must step back.”6
Chisholm did not, of course, win the Presidential nomination. After an underfunded, under-organized campaign in which security was a constant problem (Chisholm evaded three confirmed death threats before she was finally given a Secret Service detail), the nomination went to the considerably more mainstream — yet still controversially liberal — white male South Dakota congressman George McGovern.7 She continued to serve in Congress until the Reagan administration, whereupon she moved on to a distinguished career in academia as a professor at Mount Holyoke College. Prior to her death in 2005, Chisholm famously said that she wanted posterity to remember that “she had guts.”8
Indeed, Madame Congresswoman. Indeed.
Notes
- “Black Panther Party for Shirley Chisholm,” The Washington Post, Times Herald (1959-1973) (April 28, 1972). Retrieved from Proquest. Return to text.
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, “(COINTELPRO) Black Extremist: Section 1.” Return to text.
- “Black Panther Party for Shirley Chisholm,” The Washington Post, Times Herald (1959-1973) (April 28, 1972). Retrieved from Proquest. Return to text.
- Jo Freeman, “Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 Presidential Campaign,” JoFreeman.com, February 2005. Return to text.
- James Barron, “Shirley Chisholm, ‘Unbossed’ Pioneer in Congress, Is Dead at 80,” New York Times, January 3, 2005. Return to text.
- Sheila Moran, “Shirley Chisholm’s Running No Matter What It Costs Her,” The Free-Lance Star vol. 88 no. 84 (April 8, 1972), 16A. Return to text.
- Barbara Winslow, Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change, 1926-2005 (Boulder: Westview Press, 2013), 124. Return to text.
- Barron, “Shirley Chisholm.” Return to text.
Hanne Blank is a cultural historian of medicine, sexuality, and the body. Her next book, FAT, is forthcoming in the Object Lessons series in Fall 2020. She teaches at Denison University.
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