Crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, earlier this month to mark the 59th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, a turning point in the struggle for civil rights, the Rev Al Sharpton’s thoughts turned to an old mentor.
Shirley Chisholm was the first Black woman to serve in the US Congress and the first woman to seek the Democratic nomination for president. More than half a century later, Sharpton now stood with Kamala Harris, the first woman of colour to serve as vice-president.
“I told her Mrs Chisholm – Mrs C as I called her – is smiling down on us,” Sharpton, 69, says by phone. “It’s a long road from her in ’68 to you on that bridge but we still got one more river to cross and that’s electing a woman president. When they do that then Mrs C can smile with that smile only she could have. She would be disappointed but not discouraged because she always believed you’ve got to keep fighting no matter how long it takes.”
The story of Chisholm’s run for the presidency in 1972, smashing gender and race barriers and unsettling old school politicians, is told in Shirley, a film written and directed by John Ridley (an Oscar winner for his 12 Years a Slave screenplay) and starring Regina King, streaming on Netflix.
Expect to hear more about the trailblazing politician, instantly recognisable for her puffy wigs and retro glasses, throughout this year, which marks the centenary of her birth. Among her evergreen quotations: “Tremendous amounts of talent are lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt”; “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring your own folding chair.”
Chisholm was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1924, the daughter of Caribbean immigrants. Her mother was a seamstress and domestic worker, her father (a follower of Marcus Garvey) worked in a factory. She lived in Barbados from age five to nine with her maternal aunt and grandmother.
She returned to Brooklyn in 1934 and excelled academically, graduating from Brooklyn College with honours in sociology and prizes for debating, and earning a master’s degree in early childhood education from Columbia University.
Chisholm began her career as a teacher, advocating for better opportunities for minority students. Her outspoken passion for social justice led her to become involved in local politics and community activism. In the 1960s she served in the New York state assembly, where she fought for education reform, affordable housing and social welfare programmes.
Sharpton first met her in 1968 when, as a 12- or 13-year-old boy preacher at a Pentecostal church in Brooklyn, he was supporting a friend of the bishop, James Farmer, in the election for New York’s 12th congressional district. “I went out and I met Shirley Chisholm, who was running against James Farmer, and she said, ‘Boy preacher, you’re on the wrong side.’ That’s how we started talking and she was very kind to me. In about two or three weeks, I switched sides.”
Sharpton adds: “She was a very regal woman, an educator. She would always say, ‘Alfred, you’re not speaking proper English. Repeat that sentence!’ She was very formal but very much a grassroots person. She’d get on the corners and take the megaphone from me and she would draw her own crowd and she probably was one of the greatest underestimated orators of our time.”
Using the slogan “unbought and unbossed”, Chisholm duly pulled off an upset victory, making history as the first African American woman elected to Congress. She declared: “Just wait, there may be some fireworks.”
Washington was still dominated by white men who had grown up in the era of Jim Crow racial segregation. One of them harassed Chisholm every day about her making the same salary as him: “I can’t believe you’re making 42.5 like me.” Eventually she told him to vanish when he saw her enter the chamber.
The historian Barbara Winslow, 78, founder of the Shirley Chisholm Project of Brooklyn Women’s Activism, says: “How was she treated? Well, the white southerners were absolutely repulsive and disgusting. One of her aides told us the story of she would go into a congressional meeting, and you’d sit all around and, when she would get up to leave, this one congressman had a bottle of Lysol and wiped off her chair.”
Leaders of the House of Representatives relegated Chisholm to the agriculture committee, a position she condemned as irrelevant to an urban district such as hers. She was reassigned, first to the veterans affairs committee and eventually to the education and labour committees. During seven terms in Congress she championed legislation to improve the lives of marginalised communities, advocating for childcare, education and healthcare reform.
In 1972 Chisholm became the first African American woman to seek the nomination for president from a major political party. She announced: “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 symbolises a new era in American political history.”
It was always a long shot and she did not expect to win. But Shola Lynch, an award-winning film-maker whose directorial debut was the documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed, understands why she did it.
“Every time she went on a campus to speak, people would be like, Shirley Chisholm, you should be our president!” Lynch says. “She had defied odds twice to become something that nobody could imagine. So part of her was like, you know what? Let’s do it. That willingness to put yourself out there and to try and to go for it and to not limit yourself as a woman, as a Black woman, is an incredible example.
“To have her in the documentary telling her own story, she becomes your relative, the aunt you wish you had who did the amazing thing you didn’t realise when you ignored her at Thanksgiving so many times because she had that weird fur on and then all of a sudden, you’re old enough to be like, hot diggity woman, you did that?!”
With a coalition of students, women and minority groups serving as her campaign volunteers and a shoestring budget of $300,000, Chisholm entered a dozen state primaries and campaigned in several states in what became known as the “Chisholm Trail”. She seized the opportunity to rattle the status quo and advocate for issues such as gender and racial equality and economic justice.
She also pushed into once unthinkable political territory. Winslow, author of Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change, says: “She was in the Florida Panhandle. It’s pretty conservative, to put in bluntly, and she’s campaigning in a town where there had been a very famous lynching. She writes later that she’s campaigning under a Confederate statue of men with a rifle and she has a good-sized crowd. This elderly Black man comes up to her afterwards and says, ‘I never thought I’d live to see the day.’”
Chisholm had the backing of the Black Panther party and the civil rights stalwart Rosa Parks. But she faced opposition, resistance and scepticism as she took on white male rivals including George McGovern, George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie. Black activists such as Jesse Jackson, John Conyers Jr and Julian Bond supported McGovern.
Sharpton says: “I remember going with her to meetings where she would come out almost with tears in her eyes because Black men, Black elected officials that she had fought for, would not support her only because she was a woman. She would always say to me, ‘Alfred, we are fighting racism and misogyny.’ I couldn’t believe these are guys that would preach Black power and they had already made their deals with McGovern and others and wouldn’t support her.”
Chisholm boycotted 1972’s National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, because it was dominated by men and the conveners could not decide whether to endorse her campaign.
Sharpton adds: “She was disappointed in a lot of the women’s groups and the Black groups that didn’t support her. I think that hurt her. I was more angry than she was because I felt as a kid that these guys and women’s groups weren’t who they said they were; this was my first exposure to the hypocrisy of a lot of them.
“She would say, ‘Alfred, it is a scar but you have to learn to fight through your pain and keep going and keep going. She was determined to go ahead but I think it hurt her because she, in some cases, was as surprised as I was.”
Chisholm alienated some Black voters when she visited Wallace, a governor of Alabama who had built his political career on racial segregation, in hospital as he recovered from an assassination attempt. It was a hugely controversial and divisive gesture.
Congresswoman Barbara Lee, then a student president, Black Panther party volunteer and campaign organiser for Chisholm in California, was mortified. “I hated that,” she recalls by phone from Washington DC. “I was about ready to leave the campaign. Oh, my God, here I was, idealistic, young, first campaign, first time I registered to vote.
“Got to know her, loved her dearly, loved her politics and then she goes to meet this segregationist who’s known as a racist who I couldn’t stand because of what he did to people in Alabama. Here he was running for president. I was furious. She took me to task and she used to shake her finger at me – she called me little girl – and she said you’ve got to stop and you have to be human.”
Lee, 77, was later told by Wallace’s daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy, what had happened in the hospital meeting. “Shirley Chisholm said, I’m a Christian, and she prayed with him. She was the one responsible for George Wallace in his wheelchair (he was paralysed) rolling down the middle of Dexter Avenue Baptist church [in Alabama] apologising to the Black community for his segregationist views and the harm he had done. Of course, that was much too little too late and an expedient political move. But he did it.”
Chisholm herself did not regret the meeting, arguing that Wallace always spoke well of her and helped her rally support among southerners in Congress for a bill to extend federal minimum wage provisions to domestic workers.
It was a lesson that Lee, who appears as a character in Shirley, took to heart in her own political career. “There were people like George Bush I’ve had to deal with. I disagreed with him on everything when I brought to him my legislation, and talked to him about global Aids and needing to do something, he signed the bills that I put forth that established the Pepfar programme and the Global Fund and all of those global initiatives and helped save 25 million lives. That’s because I worked with a rightwing Republican who I voted against and disagreed with on every policy he put forward. So she taught me a lot.”
She arrived at the 1972 Democratic national convention with 152 delegates, more than Muskie or Humphrey. But McGovern had put together 1,729 delegates and claimed the nomination. He went on to lose in a landslide to President Richard Nixon. Chisholm went back to Congress and rose in leadership to become the secretary of the House Democratic caucus.
She retired in 1983, noting that “moderate and liberal” members were “running for cover from the new right” in the era of Ronald Reagan. In addition, her second husband, Arthur Hardwick, had been injured in a car accident and needed extensive care (her first marriage, to Conrad Chisholm, ended in divorce in 1977 and she did not have children).
Chisholm co-founded the National Political Congress of Black Women, which represented the concerns of African American women, and taught politics and women’s studies at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and Spelman College in Atlanta. She also had fun. Lee – who helped the film-makers with historical research, visited the set and attended this week’s premiere in Los Angeles – recalls: “She was always dancing and she came to my mother’s 75th birthday party in Berkeley.
“She and my mother danced with the young guys until 2am, closed the place down. I have pictures of her on the dancefloor. She was a fun-loving person. She was very sensitive, though, and she cried a lot in private but you would never know it because she was a very stern, very tough, very brilliant strong Black woman.”
President Bill Clinton nominated Chisholm to be US ambassador to Jamaica but she declined due to ill health. She died aged 80 in 2005 at her home in Ormond Beach, Florida. Lee has since fought hard to preserve her legacy. She arranged for a portrait of Chisholm to be displayed at the US Capitol and is now working on the creation of a congressional gold medal in her honour.
When Harris made her own bid for the White House in 2019, she paid tribute to Chisholm in her campaign speeches, slogans and colours. But she abandoned her run before the Iowa caucuses, meaning that America is still waiting for its first female president after nearly 250 years.
Sharpton reflects: “She was very proud of her race and her gender and she in private would say that it always takes people in history to take us to the next step and, if I’ve got to take America to the next step for Blackness and Black America to the next step for misogyny, then let me be that vessel.
“The thing that was always striking to me about Mrs C is she never saw herself in contemporary terms. She saw herself as historic and that’s how she would talk about it. She would tell me, ‘Don’t pay attention to tomorrow’s tabloids; think about what history will say about you, young man.’ That’s how she thought.”
Shirley is now available on Netflix
