Black History Month • Shirley Chisholm
Growing Up
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was born in Brooklyn, NY on November 30th of 1924. She was the oldest of four daughters to immigrant parents. Her father being from Gayana and her mother being from Barbados, she spent the ages 5 to 9 in Barbados. She graduated from Brooklyn Girls’ High in 1942 and Brooklyn College in 1946. She earned her Bachelor of Arts, majoring in sociology and minoring in Spanish. She won many prizes for her debating skills and graduated cum laude. Her professors encouraged her to consider a political career but she felt that she would face a “double handicap” as both black and female. However, after working in early childhood education, in 1950’s she became involved in local Democratic Party politics.
She was first married to Conrad O. Chisholm in the late 1940’s. He had migrated to the U.S. from Jamaica in 1946 and became a P.I. who specialized in negligence-based lawsuits. She unfortunately suffered 2 miscarriages during their marriage and the couple never had children. But in February 1977 the marriage ended in a divorce. Later that year she married Arthur Hardwick Jr. a former New York Assemblyman who she knew when they both served in that body.
In 1953 she joined Wesley “Mac” Holder’s effort to elect Lewis Flagg Jr. as the first black judge in Brooklyn. She also worked as a volunteer for white-dominated political clubs in Brooklyn, like the Brooklyn Democratic Clubs and the League of Women Voters. She sought to make a meaningful change in the structure and makeup of any organization she was a part of. Specifically the Brooklyn Democratic Clubs which resulted in her being able to recruit more people of color into the 17th District Club and local politics.
State Assembly
In 1964 Chisholm sought to run for a seat in the New York state assembly. She faced resistance based on her sex, the Unity Democratic Club hesitant to support a female candidate. Nonetheless, she chose to appeal directly to the women voters. She won the Democratic primary in June of 1964 and then won the seat in December with over 18,000 votes Republican and Liberal party candidates, neither of whom received more than 1,900 votes. Chisholm was a member of the New York State Assembly from 1965 to 1963. One of her early activities in the Assembly was to argue against the state’s literacy test requiring English, saying that just because a person “functions better in their native language is no sign a person is illiterate.” By early 1966, she was a leader in a push by the statewide Council of Elected Negro Democrats for black representation on key committees in the Assembly.
The House
In 1968 Chisholm ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from the New York 12th congressional district. Her campaign slogan was “Unbought and unbossed” In June of 1968 she defeated two other black opponents in the Democratic primary elections. Then in the general election she staged an upset victory winning by an approximately two-to-one margin becoming the first black woman to be elected to Congress.
Congress
In 1971 Chisholm joined the Congressional Black Caucus as one of its founding members. In that same year she was also a founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus. In July of that year she began exploring her candidacy and formally announced her presidential bid by January 25 of 1972. Chisholm became the first African American ro run for a major party’s nomination for President of the United States, also the first woman ever to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. In her presidential announcement, Chisholm described herself as representative of the people and offered a new articulation of American identity: “I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people and my presence before you symbolizes a new era in American political history.”
Her campaign was underfunded, only spending $300,000 in total. She also struggled to be regarded as a serious candidate instead of as a symbolic political figure; the Democratic political establishment ignored her, and her black male colleagues provided little support. She later said, “When I ran for Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men.” In particular, she expressed frustration about the “black matriarch thing”, saying, “They think I am trying to take power from them. The black man must step forward, but that doesn’t mean the black woman must step back.”
Later Years
In 1979 her second husband, Hardwick was badly injured in a car accident and she decided to take care of him, leaving Congress. She was also dissatisfied with the course of liberal politics in the wake of the Reagan Revolution. After retirement she made her home in Williamsville New York, A suburb of Buffalo. She returned to teaching, being named to the Purington Chair at the all-women Mount Holyoke College, a position she held for 4 years. After her husbands death in 1986 Chisholm moved to Florida. In 1995 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
January 1, 2005 Chisholm died at the age of 81 at her home in Ormond Beach, Florida. Her health had been in decline after she suffered a series of small strokes the previous summer. She is buried in the Birchwood Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo where the legend inscribed in her vault reads: “Unbought and Unbossed”
Special thanks to the author, Shelby Tyre. For more Black History, click here.
