The first African-American Congresswoman, Shirley Anita
Chisholm represented a newly reapportioned U.S. House
district centered in Brooklyn, New York. Elected in 1968
with deep roots in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood,
Chisholm was catapulted into the national limelight by
virtue of her race, gender, and outspoken personality. In
1972, in a largely symbolic undertaking, she campaigned
for the Democratic presidential nomination. But “Fighting
Shirley” Chisholm’s frontal assault on many congressional
traditions and her reputation as a crusader limited her
influence as a legislator in an institution long resistant to
change. “I am the people’s politician,” she once told the New
York Times. “If the day should ever come when the people
can’t save me, I’ll know I’m finished. That’s when I’ll go
back to being a professional educator.”1
Shirley Anita St. Hill was born on November 30, 1924,
in Brooklyn, New York. She was the oldest of four daughters
of Charles St. Hill, a factory laborer from Guyana, and
Ruby Seale St. Hill, a seamstress from Barbados. For part
of her childhood, Shirley St. Hill lived in Barbados on her
maternal grandparents’ farm, receiving a British education
while her parents worked during the Great Depression to
settle the family in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The most apparent
manifestation of her West Indies roots was the slight,
clipped British accent she retained throughout her life. She
attended public schools in Brooklyn and graduated with
high marks. Accepted to Vassar and Oberlin colleges, Shirley
St. Hill attended Brooklyn College on scholarship and
graduated cum laude with a BA in sociology in 1946. From
1946 to 1953, Chisholm worked as a nursery school teacher
and then as the director of two daycare centers. She married
Conrad Q. Chisholm, a private investigator, in 1949.
Three years later, Shirley Chisholm earned an MA in early
childhood education from Columbia University. She served
as an educational consultant for New York City’s division
of day care from 1959 to 1964. In 1964 Chisholm was
elected to the New York state legislature; she was the second
African-American woman to serve in Albany.
A court-ordered redistricting that carved a new Brooklyn
congressional district out of Chisholm’s Bedford-Stuyvesant
neighborhood convinced her to run for Congress. The
influential Democratic political machine, headed by
Stanley Steingut, declared its intention to send an African-American candidate from the new district to the House.
The endorsement of the machine usually resulted in a
primary victory, which was tantamount to election in the heavily Democratic area. In the primary, Chisholm faced
three African-American challengers: civil court judge
Thomas R. Jones, a former district leader and New York
assemblyman; Dolly Robinson, a former district co-leader;
and William C. Thompson, a well-financed state senator.
Chisholm roamed the new district in a sound truck that
pulled up outside housing projects while she announced:
“Ladies and Gentlemen … this is fighting Shirley Chisholm
coming through.” Chisholm capitalized on her personal
campaign style. “I have a way of talking that does something
to people,” she noted. “I have a theory about campaigning.
You have to let them feel you.”2
In the primary in mid-June 1968, Chisholm defeated Thompson, her nearest
competitor, by about 800 votes in an election characterized
by light voter turnout.
In the general election, Chisholm faced Republican-Liberal James Farmer, one of the principal figures of the
civil rights movement, a cofounder of the Congress of
Racial Equality, and an organizer of the Freedom Riders
in the early 1960s. The two candidates held similar
positions on housing, employment, and education issues,
and both opposed the Vietnam War. Farmer charged that
the Democratic Party “took [Black voters] for granted
and thought they had us in their pockets.... We must be
in a position to use our power as a swing vote.”3
But the
election turned on the issue of gender. Farmer hammered
away, arguing that “women have been in the driver’s seat”
in Black communities for too long and that the district
needed “a man’s voice in Washington,” not that of a
“little schoolteacher.”4
Chisholm, whose campaign motto
was “unbought and unbossed,” met that charge head-on, using Farmer’s rhetoric to highlight discrimination
against women and explain her unique qualifications.
“There were Negro men in office here before I came in five
years ago, but they didn’t deliver,” Chisholm countered.
“People came and asked me to do something … I’m here
because of the vacuum.” Chisholm portrayed Farmer as
an outsider (he lived in Manhattan) and used her fluent
Spanish to appeal to the growing Hispanic population in
the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. (Members of the
Puerto Rican diaspora accounted for about 20 percent
of the district vote.) The deciding factor, however, was
the district’s overwhelming liberal tilt: More than 80
percent of the voters were registered Democrats. Chisholm
won the general election by a resounding 67 percent of
the vote.5
Chisholm’s freshman class included two African
Americans of future prominence: Louis Stokes of Ohio
and William Lacy Clay Sr., of Missouri—and boosted the
number of African Americans in the House from six to
nine, the largest total up to that time.6
Chisholm was the
only new woman to enter Congress in 1969.
Chisholm’s welcome in the House was not warm, due to
her refusal to abide by long-standing House expectations
for first-term Members to fly under the radar. “I have no
intention of just sitting quietly and observing,” she said.
“I intend to focus attention on the nation’s problems.” She
did just that, lashing out against the Vietnam War in her
first floor speech on March 26, 1969. Chisholm vowed to
vote against any defense appropriation bill “until the time
comes when our values and priorities have been turned
right-side up again.”7
She was assigned to the Committee
on Agriculture, a decision she appealed directly to House
Speaker John W. McCormack of Massachusetts (bypassing
Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Daigh
Mills of Arkansas, who oversaw Democratic committee
appointments). McCormack told her to be a “good soldier,”
at which point Chisholm brought her complaint to the
House Floor. She was reassigned to the Veterans’ Affairs
Committee which, though not one of her top choices, was
more relevant to her district’s makeup. “There are a lot more
veterans in my district than trees,” she quipped.8
From
1971 to 1977 she served on the Committee on Education
and Labor, having won a place on that panel with the help
of Hale Boggs of Louisiana, whom she had endorsed as
Majority Leader.9
She also served on the Committee on
Organization Study and Review (known as the Hansen
Committee), whose recommended reforms for the selection
of committee chairmen were adopted by the Democratic
Caucus in 1971. From 1977 to 1981, Chisholm served as
Secretary of the Democratic Caucus. She eventually left
her Education Committee assignment to accept a seat on
the Rules Committee in 1977, becoming the first Black
woman—and the second woman ever—to serve on that
powerful panel. Chisholm also was a founding member of
the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in 1971 and the
Congressional Women’s Caucus in 1977.
Chisholm continued to work for the causes she had
espoused as a community activist. She sponsored increases
in federal funding to extend the hours of daycare facilities
and a guaranteed minimum annual income for families.
She was a fierce defender of federal assistance for education, serving as a primary backer of a national school lunch bill
and leading her colleagues in overriding President Gerald R.
Ford’s veto on this measure. However, Chisholm did not
view herself as a “lawmaker, an innovator in the field
of legislation”; in her efforts to address the needs of the
“have-nots,” she often chose to work outside the established
system. At times she criticized Democratic leadership in
Congress as much as she did the Republicans in the White
House. She was an explorer and a trailblazer rather than a
legislative artisan.10
True to this approach, Chisholm declared her candidacy
for the 1972 Democratic nomination for President,
charging that none of the other candidates represented the
interests of Black and minority voters and the inner-city
poor. She campaigned across the country and succeeded in
getting her name on 12 primary ballots, becoming as well
known outside her Brooklyn neighborhood as she was in
it. At the Democratic National Convention she received
152 delegate votes, or 10 percent of the total, a respectable
showing given her modest funding. A 1974 Gallup Poll
listed her as one of the top 10 most-admired women in
America—ahead of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and
Coretta Scott King and tied with Indian Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi for sixth place.11 But while the presidential
bid enhanced Chisholm’s national profile, it also stirred
controversy among her House colleagues. Chisholm’s
candidacy split the CBC. Many Black male colleagues felt
she had not consulted them or that she had betrayed the
group’s interests by trying to create a coalition of women,
Hispanics, white liberals, and welfare recipients.12 Pervasive
gender discrimination, Chisholm noted, cut across racial
lines: “Black male politicians are no different from white
male politicians. This ‘woman thing’ is so deep. I’ve found
it out in this campaign if I never knew it before.”13 Her
presidential campaign also strained relations with other
women Members of Congress, particularly Bella Savitzky
Abzug of New York, who endorsed South Dakota Senator
George Stanley McGovern instead of Chisholm.
By 1976 Chisholm faced a stiff challenge from within
her own party primary by a longtime political rival, New
York city councilman Samuel D. Wright. Born and raised
in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Wright was a formidable opponent
who had represented Brooklyn in the New York assembly
for a number of years before winning a seat on the city
council. He criticized Chisholm for her absenteeism in
the House, brought on by the rigors of her presidential campaign, and for what he said was a lack of connection
with the district. Chisholm countered by playing on her
national credentials and her role as a reformer of Capitol
Hill culture. “I think my role is to break new ground in
Congress,” Chisholm noted. She insisted that her strength
was in bringing legislative factions together. “I can talk
with legislators from the South, the West, all over. They
view me as a national figure and that makes me more
acceptable.”14 Two weeks later Chisholm turned back
Wright and Hispanic political activist Luz Vega in the
Democratic primary, winning 54 percent of the vote to
Wright’s 36 percent and Vega’s 10 percent.15 She won the
general election handily with 83 percent of the vote.16
From the late 1970s onward, Brooklyn Democrats
speculated that Chisholm was losing interest in her House
seat. Her name was widely floated as a possible candidate for
several jobs related to education, including president of the
City College of New York and chancellor of the New York
City public school system.17 In 1982 Chisholm declined
to seek re-election. “Shirley Chisholm would like to have a
little life of her own,” she told the Christian Science Monitor,
citing personal reasons for her decision to leave the House;
she wanted to spend more time with her second husband,
Arthur Hardwick Jr., a New York state legislator she had
married about six months after divorcing Conrad Chisholm
in 1977.18
Other reasons, too, factored into Chisholm’s decision
to leave the House. She had grown disillusioned over the
conservative turn the country had taken with the election
of President Ronald Reagan in 1980. Also, there were
tensions with people on her side of the political fence,
particularly African-American politicians who, she insisted,
misunderstood her efforts to build alliances. While her
rhetoric about racial inequality could be passionate at
times, Chisholm’s actions toward the white establishment in
Congress were often conciliatory. Chisholm maintained that
many members of the Black community did not understand
the need for negotiation with white politicians. “We still
have to engage in compromise, the highest of all arts,”
Chisholm noted. “Blacks can’t do things on their own, nor
can whites. When you have black racists and white racists it
is very difficult to build bridges between communities.”19
After leaving Congress in January 1983, Chisholm
cofounded the National Political Congress of Black Women
and campaigned for Jesse Jackson’s presidential bids in
1984 and 1988. She also taught at Mt. Holyoke College in 1983. Though nominated as U.S. Ambassador to Jamaica
by President William J. (Bill) Clinton, Chisholm declined
due to ill health. She settled in Palm Coast, Florida, where
she wrote and lectured, and died on January 1, 2005, in
Ormond Beach, Florida.20
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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