February 5, 2022 • 33 mins
This 2018 episode Shirley Chisolm, who was politically active starting during her college years. Her drive and desire to make positive change led her to many political firsts, including being the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Shirley Chisholm is getting a quick mention in
one of our upcoming episodes. Since our episode on her
came out a few years ago, at this point, we
thought we would bring it back into people's feeds. One
thing we mentioned in this episode as that in the
future we might do an episode on the Equal Rights Amendment.
That future has happened now. We did that episode on
February If you're curious for me as well, have been
(00:26):
a hundred years ago. I don't even so, I know
it's whatever. What eon was that? But this episode originally
came out on November five. We hope you enjoy Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:52):
Tracy be Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we are
going to talk about Shirley Chisholm. She has been on
my list for a really long time, but we're coming
up on the fiftieth anniversary of her becoming the first
black woman elected to the US Congress. I think this
episode is actually coming out on that anniversary, so it
seemed like a really good time to move her up
(01:14):
from the top of the list. She's also making appearance
on this day in history class, so it is great
to be able to research two different shows at the
same time. Who Uh. Shirley Chisholm was born Shirley Anita
st Hill on November nine, four in Brooklyn, New York.
Her parents were both immigrants to the United States. Her mother,
Ruby was from Barbados and immigrated to the US in ninete.
(01:38):
Shirley's father, Charles, was born in British Guiana which is
now just Guiana, and he lived in Barbados in Cuba
before arriving in the US in ninete, and even though
he had been born in South America, he always thought
of himself as Barbadian. Charles and Ruby had met in
Barbados before they each, independently of one another, immigrated to
the United States. They both move to Brooklyn, which had
(02:01):
a significant population of Caribbean immigrants. At least sixteen percent
of Brooklyn's black residents were from the Caribbean. Charles and
Ruby became reacquainted in Brooklyn and they got married after
a short but very strict and traditional courtship. The st
Hills went on to have four daughters. Shirley was the oldest,
and was followed by Odessa, Muriel, and Selma. Charles and
(02:23):
Ruby raised their daughters to be disciplined, thrifty, and hard
working Christians. They also had two very clear goals for
their family. They wanted to own their home and they
wanted all of their daughters to go to college. But
money was a very serious obstacle to both of these goals.
Charles was a laborer and his job as a baker's
assistant was very low paying. There weren't really any options
(02:46):
for affordable childcare either, so Ruby couldn't work outside the home.
Once she started having children. She tried to help make
ends meet by taking in sewing, but it was just
not enough money for them to save for a home
or for a college education for their daughters. So in
before their youngest daughter, Selma, was born, the st Hills
(03:06):
decided to send Shirley, Odessa, and Muriel to Barbados. There,
they would live with Ruby's mother and be raised with
the help of a sister, and the girl's education was
part of this decision. Ruby thought that they would get
a better education in Barbados, where schools were strict and
focused on reading, writing, and arithmetic, rather than in the US,
which had widely adopted kindergarten and play based learning in
(03:29):
the early grades. Ruby traveled to Barbados with her daughters
and four of their cousins and she stayed there for
six months before going back to Brooklyn. And of course,
life in Barbados was dramatically different from what the girls
had been used to back in the States. They went
from living in a densely populated city to living on
a farm, and their chores on the farm included caring
(03:50):
for the animals and vegetables that would help be the family.
The culture shock was repeated when the st Hills decided
to bring their daughters back from Barbados when Shirley was ten.
She had left for Barbados at the age of three,
and she had very little memory of Brooklyn by the
time she got home again. In Barbados, she had been
living in a close knit community where everyone knew each other,
(04:11):
but Brooklyn was full of strangers that she wasn't supposed
to talk to. The people around her in Brooklyn were
also very different. At the time, the st Hills were
living in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood, which was predominantly Jewish and
included a lot of emigrants from Eastern Europe, as well
as people from Italy, Puerto Rico, and Syria. In Barbados,
they had been surrounded almost entirely by other Barbadians. Shirley
(04:34):
also started seeing racial prejudice and discrimination after getting back
to the US. There was, of course racism in Barbados,
which was still under British colonial rule and was home
to a growing movement for independence and civil rights, but
since they had been living on a farm in a
rural area, it just was not something that the children
were conscious about day to day. In Brooklyn, however, racial
(04:56):
disparities were obvious. For example, Shirley went from attending a
school in Barbados that had black teachers and staff to
one in Brooklyn in which nearly all the teachers and
administrators were white. The family also experienced poverty in both
Barbados in Brooklyn like The reason that the st Hills
had not all gone to Barbados together was that that
(05:16):
would have been even harder than having the parents in
New York and the children in Barbados. But the experience
of poverty was completely different in these two places. And Barbados,
they were poor, but they were able to raise their
own food, and they were surrounded by a community of
people who were in very similar circumstances, and they all
worked to support and nurture each other. But in Brooklyn
(05:38):
they faced social stigma about being poorer. On top of
hunger and a lack of resources, it was also cold.
Apart from the temperature differences between New York and the Caribbean,
parts of the St. Hill Home in Brooklyn had no heat.
Based on her age and her education in Barbados, surely
should have started sixth grade when she came back to
(05:58):
the US, but was placed in third grade instead. Her
skills in subjects like reading and writing were really good,
but because she hadn't been attending school in the United States,
she knew very little about US history and geography. Naturally,
she was bored and unchallenged, and she dealt with it
by misbehaving in class. Fortunately, her teacher realized exactly what
(06:21):
was going on right away and arranged for her to
have a tutor. Within eighteen months, she had surpassed her
peers of her own age and had grown to really
love school, and that was something that would continue for
the rest of her education. In nineteen thirty six, the St.
Hills moved from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood to Bedford Stuyvesant. With
all the girls in school, Shirley's mother was able to
(06:43):
work again and she got a job as a domestic.
Shirley became responsible for her younger sisters, so she would
pick them up to go home for lunch, take them
back to school, and then after school she would pick
them up again and look after them until after their
mother got home. Ruby was still really involved in her
daughter's vibes in their education, though sometimes she would do
her daughter's chores so that they could spend more time
(07:04):
on their school work, and then she also took them
on regular trips to the public library and asked them
lots and lots of questions about the books that they
were reading before their next trip. Shirley entered Girls High
School in Brooklyn in nineteen thirty nine, and she graduated
in nineteen forty two. She excelled there and she got
scholarships to Vassar and Oberlin, but the st Hills could
(07:25):
not afford to pay for room and board at either
of those schools, so instead, Shirley entered Brooklyn College in
the fall of nineteen forty two. The racial disparities that
Shirley had experienced in her education so far continued when
she got to college. Even though Brooklyn had a significant
black population, there were only about sixty black students at
the college. That was out of roughly ten thousand graduate
(07:48):
and undergraduate students. Most of the teachers and administrators were
also white, and the entirety of the student council was white.
When Shirley was growing up, her parents had been very
strict and very focused on her schooling, and that continued
to be true when she started college. During her first year,
she spent most of her time studying, and she did
(08:08):
not have much of a social life. But she really
thrived in college and ultimately joined the Harriet Tubman Society,
the Debating Society, the Brooklyn chapter of the nub A
c P, and the Brooklyn Urban League. She majored in
sociology and minored in Spanish, and she graduated with honors
in nineteen Shirley also started on the path to politics
(08:30):
while she was in college. She joined the seventeenth Assembly
District Democratic Club, and she also met Wesley McDonald holder,
who was known as Mack. During her senior year. He
was a political organizer and was nicknamed the Dean of
Black Brooklyn politics. He would become her political mentor. One
of her professors also told her during class that she
(08:50):
should go into politics, and she replied, you forget two things.
I'm black and I'm a woman. But she did go
into politics, which we were going to talk about after
we first paused for a little sponsor break. After graduating
(09:11):
from college, Shirley st. Hill lived with her parents, who
had saved up enough money to buy a home thanks
to her father's work in a factory during World War Two.
For a while, she struggled to find a job, though
she was very diminutive, I mean just tiny, and she
spoke with a slight lisp, so people had trouble believing
that she was really a college graduate. Repeatedly, she would
(09:34):
interview for jobs that she met the qualifications for, only
to be told that she did not actually meet them.
She was finally hired at Mount Cavalry child care Center
in Harlem, and she worked there from ninety to nineteen
fifty three. She also started a master's degree program in
early childhood education at Columbia Teachers College. She took classes
(09:55):
at night while working at the child care center during
the day. In ninet forty nine, she married Conrad Chisholm,
who had emigrated to the United States from Jamaica. They
moved into a home near Shirley's parents. At first they
hoped to have children, but Shirley had two miscarriages, and
later on she said quote, if I had children, I
couldn't be out here doing what I'm doing now. She
(10:17):
also finished her master's degree in nineteen fifty one. Shirley
Chisholm had been active in the seventeenth Assembly District Democratic
Club since college, and in three she took part in
her first political campaign. A seat had opened up in
the second Municipal Court, which was local to where she lived.
Chisholm worked with the campaign to elect Louis S. Flag, Jr.
(10:39):
Who became Brooklyn's first black judge, which was a huge milestone.
Campaign workers tried to keep this momentum going by reforming
the Flag campaign into the Bedford Stuyvesant Political League or BSPL.
Chisholm became its vice president. Chisholm had noticed that in
all the political organizations she was part of, women were
really active of, but they were also relegated to tasks
(11:02):
like preparing food, cleaning up, and organizing events and raffles.
Many of the organizations were integrated, but essentially segregated themselves
when it came to things like seating arrangements. Chisholm thought
all of that needed to change, so she ran for
president of the BSPL. This led to problems because her
opponent was her long time mentor Mac Holder. She lost
(11:26):
this election, but the fact that she had run against
him at all led to a huge rift between the
two of them. In nineteen fifty eight, at the age
of thirty four, Chisholm left both the Seventeenth Assembly Districts
Democratic Club and the BSPL, feeling frustrated and like as
a woman, she didn't have any future and politics beyond
(11:46):
canvassing and cleaning up after meetings. In nineteen fifty nine,
Chisholm became a consultant to the New York City Division
of Daycare, and in nineteen sixty she returned to politics.
She and several others had been part of the Flag
Campaign started the Unity Democratic Club, which was racially integrated
and which had women in many prominent positions. This eased
(12:09):
some of Chisholm's frustrations, but at the same time, she
was still doing a lot of work campaigning for other people,
when what she really wanted was to be the one
running for office. So in nineteen sixty four, Chisholm told
the Unity Democrats that she wanted to run for state representative.
They nominated her, and she won her first primary and
(12:30):
general election. This wasn't, however, one of her many political firsts.
The first black woman elected to the New York State
Legislature was Bessie Buchanan ten years earlier. While a state
legislator in Albany, Chisholm introduced two major pieces of legislation
that really illustrate what she was trying to do in politics.
The first set up unemployment insurance and social security protections
(12:54):
for personal and domestic workers. This was something she'd seen
a need for both from her mother and from so
many other working women in their Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood. The
second was the SEEK Program, which stands for Search for Education,
Elevation and Knowledge, and it was something she'd seen a
need for during her own education. The SEEK program identified
(13:15):
black and Hispanic students for both financial and academic aid
to study at the City University of New York or
the State University of New York. This program still exists today,
and it works to bridge the gap for financially and
educationally underprivileged students. After a redistricting, Chisholm had to run
for re election in nineteen sixty five, even though her
(13:35):
first term wasn't over. She ran again in the regular
election cycle in nineteen sixty six and was once again reelected.
Her other legislation during those years as a state representative
included funding for daycare centers for the children of working
women and laws to ensure that teachers didn't lose their
seniority if they went on maternity leave. She also advocated
(13:57):
for the repeal of New York's laws criminalizing a board,
which happened in nineteen seventy after she had left office.
These years in the state capital were really challenging for Chisholm.
She spent about five days a week in Albany while
her husband was at home in Brooklyn, and her father
had also died the year before she was elected. She
and her father had been very close, and a lot
(14:19):
of her earliest political opinions had been informed through discussions
with him about figures like Marcus Garvey She had also
become somewhat estranged from her mother and sisters because she
inherited her father's money while they inherited the house. Her
isolation in Albany was professional as well as personal. There
were only a handful of women in the state legislature,
(14:41):
and she was the only black woman. It was socially
unacceptable for women to go out to bars, which is
what most of the men were doing. At the end
of the day. She frequently felt like she was being overlooked,
and this was a pattern in her political career, which
would lead her to say, quote, if they don't give
you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.
In nineteen sixty eight, a court ordered reapportionment created a
(15:04):
new congressional district in New York and that was centered
on Shirley Chisholm's neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant. This newly created
thirteen district was majority black, and it also had a
large Puerto Rican population. It was pretty much taken for
granted that the representative elected from this new district would
be black, but it was also pretty much taken for
(15:24):
granted that it would be a man. Twelve people announced
their candidacy, and Chisholm was the only woman. It was
during this campaign that Chisholm started using the slogan unbought
and unbossed. She also repaired her relationship with mac Holder,
who got in touch and said that he wanted to
be part of her campaign. Chisholm one the Democratic primary
(15:46):
in this election by a huge margin, and then in
the general election, her opponent was James Farmer, who was
running on both the Republican and Liberal Party tickets. Farmer
was the former head of the Congress of Racial Acquire
or CORE, as well as one of its founders. He
had also organized and participated in the Freedom Rides, and
(16:07):
he and a whole lot of other people thought his
election was a sure thing. Chisholm and Farmer agreed on
a lot of their key issues. They had essentially the
same talking points on things like housing, employment, and education.
Both of them were also against the Vietnam War, so
Farmer's campaign was less about the issues and more about gender.
(16:29):
He framed himself as a powerful man whose voice was
needed in Washington and dismissed Chisholm as quote some school teacher.
Farmer wasn't the only person focused on gender and this
During the campaign, the New York Times ran this headline,
Farmer and woman in lively Bedford Stuyvesant Race. That makes
(16:52):
me kind of want to grind my teeth, but I'm
gonna Meanwhile, Chisholm and mac Holder worked day night to
canvas in campaign. They pointed out that Farmer lived in Harlem,
not Brooklyn. Chisholm was fluent in Spanish and reached directly
out to the district's Puerto Rican voters. She emphasized all
(17:12):
the work that she had done in Albany that directly
affected people in Brooklyn, especially women, and women registered voters
outnumbered men as registered voters in the district. And the
middle of all this, though, Chisholm developed a fibroid tumor
and she had to have surgery, so she had to
take a break from the campaign. Farmer started playing up
her absence from the campaign trail until she finally defied
(17:35):
her doctor's orders. She went out on her front steps
with a bullhorn. This required her to walk down several
flights of steps first, and with this bullhorn she said,
ladies and gentlemen, this is fighting. Shirley Chisholm, and I
am up and around in spite of what people are saying.
Oh November five, Chisholm won the election against James Farmer
(17:56):
thirty four thousand, eight five votes to thir teen thousand,
seven hundred seventy seven. She became the first black woman
elected to Congress and only one of ten women in
Congress that year. The only other woman of color was
Patsy Mink of Hawaii, who was Japanese American and the
first woman of color elected to Congress. There were also
(18:18):
only ten black legislators in Congress that year. We will
talk about her time as a representative and her run
for the presidency after another sponsor break. When Shirley Chisholm
took office as a US Representative from New York number one,
(18:41):
she referred to herself as a black woman congressman, which
delights me. She also recognized the role that women had
played in getting her elected, and she recognized the fact
that women were largely being excluded from Washington politics. So
to try to start closing that gap in her term,
she hired only women for her staff. At the same time,
(19:04):
she knew that as a junior legislator, she really needed
experienced people to help her in order to be effective,
so a lot of the women she hired had served
on the staff of Joseph Resnick, who had elected not
to run for re election. Almost immediately after being sworn in,
Chisholm started breaking protocol. In Washington, it was expected for
junior legislators to basically listen and not make waves. But
(19:28):
when she got her committee assignment, it was to the
Rural Development and Forestry Committee of the Agriculture Committee. This
was completely outside her experience and also not particularly relevant
to her constituents back in Brooklyn, New York. She thought
this was ridiculous, and she tried to be recognized to
speak to protest it, but every time she stood up,
(19:49):
a more senior representative would stand up and be called on. Finally,
she walked down to the well at the floor of
the House, and when asked what she was doing down there,
she said, quote, I've been trying to get recognized for
half an hour, Mr Chairman, but evidently you were unable
to see me, so I came down to the well.
I would just like to tell the caucus why I
(20:09):
vehemently reject my committee assignment. This was really unheard of.
It was not done among junior legislators especially to do
something like this, but she was ultimately reassigned to the
Veterans Affairs Committee. This was definitely not her first choice,
but it was at least a place where she felt
like she could serve her constituents because there were plenty
(20:30):
of veterans living in Brooklyn. From there, Chisholm continued to
take bold, uncompromising steps. Her first speech in the House
was anti war, and she announced that she would vote
no on every budget bill until the country started using
its resources quote for people and peace, not profits in war.
She also faced a lot of sexism, like questions about
(20:52):
what her husband thought about what she was doing, and
a very like what does your husband think of all this? Darling?
In July of nine seventy, during hearings on a House
anti discrimination measure, Chisholm said quote, during my entire political life,
my sex has been a far greater handicap than my
(21:15):
skin pigmentation. From my earliest experience in ward political activity,
my chief obstacle was that I had to break through
the role men assigned women. A young woman in a
newspaper story I read somewhere defined that role beautifully. She
was talking about her experiences in the civil rights movement. Quote,
we found that the men made the policy and the
(21:37):
women made the peanut butter sandwiches. I would like to
comment on this quote really quickly before we move on,
because a lot of people take this out of context
and try to make it be a statement that in general,
in the world, gender is a bigger issue than race,
and that's really not what she was saying. She was
(21:57):
confining this to her political life very clearly, not like
a blanket statement about which thing, being a woman or
being black is harder. Chisholm's agenda in Congress was ambitious,
but it wasn't naive. She wanted more programs for the
poor and unemployed, more support for education, more funding for
(22:19):
health care, and protections for civil rights. She helped form
the Congressional Black Caucus and later the Congresswoman's Caucus, which
is now the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues. On August tenth,
nineteen seventy she reintroduced the Equal Rights Amendment, which was
passed by Congress on March twenty two, nineteen seventy two,
(22:39):
but was not ratified by the states. That could be
a whole other podcast, and maybe will be at some
point in the future. When Chisum ran for re election
in nineteen seventy, she won eighty two percent of the
vote than In nineteen seventy one, she published her autobiography,
which was titled Unbought and Unbossed. By the time Unbought
and unbod came out, Chisholm had already been thinking about
(23:03):
running for president. In November of nineteen seventy two, she
told her staff that she planned to run. That same year,
she was appointed to the Education and Labor Committee, which
had been one of her top choices when she was
first elected. Don't announced her intention to run for president
on January nine, seventy two at Conquered Baptist Church in Brooklyn,
(23:24):
and her speech she said, quote, 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 I am
equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people,
and my presence before you now symbolizes a new era
in American political history. With this announcement, Chisholm became the
(23:45):
first black woman to seek the nomination of the Democratic Party.
Sometimes you'll see her listed as the first woman of
any race to seek the nomination for any major political party,
but that is not accurate. Margaret Chase Smith ran for
president as a Republican in eighteen sixty four and had
twenty seven delegates at the Republican National Convention. Patsy Mink,
(24:06):
who we mentioned earlier, also ran as a Democrat in
nineteen seventy two. She had been invited by Oregon Democrats
to run on their ballot to draw attention to the
movement against the Vietnam War, and she withdrew after the
Oregon primary. This has been described as more of a
symbolic campaign, but it still counts as it happened. In
her run for Congress. Chism faced all kinds of sexism
(24:27):
while running for president. Walter Cronkite started a news broadcast
about her candidacy by saying, a new hat, rather a bonnet,
has been thrown into the ring. She was also excluded
from televised debates and took her case to court, at
which point the FCC ordered that she be invited to
debate as well. And it wasn't just gendered language and
(24:49):
exclusion from debates at least three confirmed assassination threats were
made against Chisholm. During the campaign. Someone stole stationary from
one of her opponents and ped up a terribly spelled,
badly written press release claiming that she had been in
a mental institution. This release went on with a whole
series of completely fabricated claims and led to an FBI
(25:12):
investigation as there was obviously racism and sexism all tied
together in the response to her campaign. But in this campaign,
Chisum really hoped to build a coalition among anyone who
was disenfranchised or marginalized, not just black people and not
just women. She was also vocal in her support of
equal rights for Hispanics and Latinos, as well as gay
(25:35):
people and Indigenous people. She had called to have a
Native person leading the Department of the Interior, which oversees
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and she did get a
lot of grassroots support. Many of the people who worked
on her campaign were first time participants in this process.
Whenever people asked her what they needed to do to
get involved, she would tell them the first thing was
(25:56):
to register to vote, and this was just a few
years after the voting rights Act of nineteen sixty five
outlawed voting discrimination based on race. But her efforts on
the campaign were really hampered by a lack of money
and by disorganization from within the campaign. She had some
high profile celebrity backers like Harry Belafonte and Aucie Davis,
(26:16):
but other people weren't as enthusiastic even when they said
they were on her side. Glorias steinhum ran as one
of her delegates in the New York primary, but kept
doing this kind of half hearted endorsement, saying that she
was for surely Chisholm, but thought George McGovern was the
best of the male candidates. Tis Um finally told her
to either endorse McGovern or her not do this weird
(26:39):
in between thing, and she said, quote, don't do me
any favors by giving me this semi endorsement. I do
not need this kind of help. She also faced criticism
after candidate George Wallace was shot on May fifteen, nineteen
seventy two. We've done a podcast on Wallace before, in
case you needed any of that story. Uh. He was
notorious for his youth on segregation and race, although during
(27:02):
this campaign he announced that he would no longer support segregation.
Chisholm visited him in the hospital, and people were appalled,
but she felt like visiting was just the humane thing
to do, and she told him, quote, you and I
don't agree, but you have been shot and I might
be shot, and we are both children of American democracy,
so I wanted to come and see you. The Democratic
(27:24):
National Convention that year started on July temp and by
that time it was absolutely clear that there was no
way Chisholm was going to get the party's nomination. Instead,
she hoped to have enough delegates to influence the party
platform that would be created at the convention. She wound
up with a hundred and fifty two delegates, which is
about ten percent of the total after being on the
ballot in twelve states. That was more than some of
(27:47):
the other candidates, but not enough to have an impact
on the party platform or her much bigger goal of
naming a black candidate as the vice presidential running met.
She was also really disillusioned by how the process felt
more like it was about candidates making deals with one
another for their delegates than it was about candidates trying
to do right by the voters. But a more personal
(28:08):
disappointment was that her friend and colleague Ron Delum's of
the Congressional Black Caucus, was supposed to be the person
to nominate her at the convention, but he backed out
at the last minute. Her friend Percy Sutton did it instead.
On the last night of the convention, Shirley Chisholm gave
a speech and which she said she would support the
Democratic Party nominee George McGovern, But before she could give
(28:32):
that speech, she got a lengthy standing ovation. Even though
there were so many disappointments at the Democratic National Convention,
Chisholm insisted that she did not regret her decision to run.
She said, I ran because somebody had to do it first.
I ran because most people thought the country was not
ready for a black candidate, not ready for a woman candidate. Someday.
(28:54):
It was time in nineteen two to make that someday come.
Later on, she described her into the sea as not
exactly opening the door for other women and people of color,
but at least leaving the door ajar. In the nineteen
seventy two election, George McGovern was defeated colossally by incumbent
Richard Nixon and just a huge landslide like an unmatched landslide.
(29:19):
We all know how that worked out. Though, Chisholm returned
to her seat in the House of Representatives, and she
spent seven total terms in the House. In nineteen seventy five,
she co sponsored a bill to expand the federal school
lunch program, and then she led the representatives to overturn
President Gerald Ford's veto of it. In nineteen seventy seven,
she also became part of the House Rules Committee. She
(29:40):
was the first black woman to be on that committee.
In her personal life, she and Conrad Chisom divorced in
nineteen seventy seven and she remarried Arthur Hardwick Jr. Who
lived in Buffalo. And her later terms in the House
of Representatives, Chisholm didn't defy protocol in the way she
had in her first and over the years the shifts
started to draw more and more scrutiny. What she saw
(30:03):
as an attempt for consensus building was seen as being
too conciliatory and not ambitious enough. She was also criticized
for increasing time away from Washington. Some of this was
to go on speaking tours, and some of it was
to be with her second husband. After he was permanently
and seriously injured in a car accident. All of this
influenced her decision not to seek re election in nineteen two,
(30:27):
but she was also frustrated by feeling like she was
less and less able to really serve her constituents. Some
of this was due to the shifting political climate of
the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties. Her career
had really been focused on helping the needy and protecting
the marginalized, things like an increased minimum wage, unions for
domestic workers, racial equality, gay rights, and daycare for working
(30:51):
mothers and people on public assistance. But it was harder
and harder to get legislation like that past. On top
of that, for a number of economic and social reasons,
voters in her district and in similar districts all around
the country were becoming less and less engaged and politically active,
and that was making it a lot more difficult for
(31:11):
her to secure federal funds that would benefit them. After
retiring from politics, Chisholm became Sherrington Professor of Politics at
Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. She commuted back and forth
between the college and Buffalo, where she and her husband
lived and she helped found the National Political Congress of
Black Women, and she worked on Jesse Jackson's campaign for
(31:32):
the presidency in ninety four and her husband, Arthur died
in nine In Shirley Chisholm was offered the position of
ambassador to Jamaica, but she turned it down because her
health was not good anymore. She died on January one
of two thousand five at the age of eighty, and
November of President Barack Obama posthumously awarded her the Presidential
(31:57):
Medal of Freedom. Later on in her life, she said
that she didn't want to be remembered just as a
member of Congress or a candidate for president, but as
in her own words, a woman who fought for change
in the twentieth century, and that is Shirley Chisholm. Heay
(32:18):
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
email address or a Facebook U r L or something
similar over the course of the show, that could be
obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at
I Heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works
email address no longer works, and you can find us
(32:39):
all over social media at Missed in History and you
can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
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to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or
(33:01):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Happy Saturday. Shirley Chisholm is getting a quick mention in
one of our upcoming episodes. Since our episode on her
came out a few years ago, at this point, we
thought we would bring it back into people's feeds. One
thing we mentioned in this episode as that in the
future we might do an episode on the Equal Rights Amendment.
That future has happened now. We did that episode on
February If you're curious for me as well, have been
(00:26):
a hundred years ago. I don't even so, I know
it's whatever. What eon was that? But this episode originally
came out on November five. We hope you enjoy Welcome
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:52):
Tracy be Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we are
going to talk about Shirley Chisholm. She has been on
my list for a really long time, but we're coming
up on the fiftieth anniversary of her becoming the first
black woman elected to the US Congress. I think this
episode is actually coming out on that anniversary, so it
seemed like a really good time to move her up
(01:14):
from the top of the list. She's also making appearance
on this day in history class, so it is great
to be able to research two different shows at the
same time. Who Uh. Shirley Chisholm was born Shirley Anita
st Hill on November nine, four in Brooklyn, New York.
Her parents were both immigrants to the United States. Her mother,
Ruby was from Barbados and immigrated to the US in ninete.
(01:38):
Shirley's father, Charles, was born in British Guiana which is
now just Guiana, and he lived in Barbados in Cuba
before arriving in the US in ninete, and even though
he had been born in South America, he always thought
of himself as Barbadian. Charles and Ruby had met in
Barbados before they each, independently of one another, immigrated to
the United States. They both move to Brooklyn, which had
(02:01):
a significant population of Caribbean immigrants. At least sixteen percent
of Brooklyn's black residents were from the Caribbean. Charles and
Ruby became reacquainted in Brooklyn and they got married after
a short but very strict and traditional courtship. The st
Hills went on to have four daughters. Shirley was the oldest,
and was followed by Odessa, Muriel, and Selma. Charles and
(02:23):
Ruby raised their daughters to be disciplined, thrifty, and hard
working Christians. They also had two very clear goals for
their family. They wanted to own their home and they
wanted all of their daughters to go to college. But
money was a very serious obstacle to both of these goals.
Charles was a laborer and his job as a baker's
assistant was very low paying. There weren't really any options
(02:46):
for affordable childcare either, so Ruby couldn't work outside the home.
Once she started having children. She tried to help make
ends meet by taking in sewing, but it was just
not enough money for them to save for a home
or for a college education for their daughters. So in
before their youngest daughter, Selma, was born, the st Hills
(03:06):
decided to send Shirley, Odessa, and Muriel to Barbados. There,
they would live with Ruby's mother and be raised with
the help of a sister, and the girl's education was
part of this decision. Ruby thought that they would get
a better education in Barbados, where schools were strict and
focused on reading, writing, and arithmetic, rather than in the US,
which had widely adopted kindergarten and play based learning in
(03:29):
the early grades. Ruby traveled to Barbados with her daughters
and four of their cousins and she stayed there for
six months before going back to Brooklyn. And of course,
life in Barbados was dramatically different from what the girls
had been used to back in the States. They went
from living in a densely populated city to living on
a farm, and their chores on the farm included caring
(03:50):
for the animals and vegetables that would help be the family.
The culture shock was repeated when the st Hills decided
to bring their daughters back from Barbados when Shirley was ten.
She had left for Barbados at the age of three,
and she had very little memory of Brooklyn by the
time she got home again. In Barbados, she had been
living in a close knit community where everyone knew each other,
(04:11):
but Brooklyn was full of strangers that she wasn't supposed
to talk to. The people around her in Brooklyn were
also very different. At the time, the st Hills were
living in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood, which was predominantly Jewish and
included a lot of emigrants from Eastern Europe, as well
as people from Italy, Puerto Rico, and Syria. In Barbados,
they had been surrounded almost entirely by other Barbadians. Shirley
(04:34):
also started seeing racial prejudice and discrimination after getting back
to the US. There was, of course racism in Barbados,
which was still under British colonial rule and was home
to a growing movement for independence and civil rights, but
since they had been living on a farm in a
rural area, it just was not something that the children
were conscious about day to day. In Brooklyn, however, racial
(04:56):
disparities were obvious. For example, Shirley went from attending a
school in Barbados that had black teachers and staff to
one in Brooklyn in which nearly all the teachers and
administrators were white. The family also experienced poverty in both
Barbados in Brooklyn like The reason that the st Hills
had not all gone to Barbados together was that that
(05:16):
would have been even harder than having the parents in
New York and the children in Barbados. But the experience
of poverty was completely different in these two places. And Barbados,
they were poor, but they were able to raise their
own food, and they were surrounded by a community of
people who were in very similar circumstances, and they all
worked to support and nurture each other. But in Brooklyn
(05:38):
they faced social stigma about being poorer. On top of
hunger and a lack of resources, it was also cold.
Apart from the temperature differences between New York and the Caribbean,
parts of the St. Hill Home in Brooklyn had no heat.
Based on her age and her education in Barbados, surely
should have started sixth grade when she came back to
(05:58):
the US, but was placed in third grade instead. Her
skills in subjects like reading and writing were really good,
but because she hadn't been attending school in the United States,
she knew very little about US history and geography. Naturally,
she was bored and unchallenged, and she dealt with it
by misbehaving in class. Fortunately, her teacher realized exactly what
(06:21):
was going on right away and arranged for her to
have a tutor. Within eighteen months, she had surpassed her
peers of her own age and had grown to really
love school, and that was something that would continue for
the rest of her education. In nineteen thirty six, the St.
Hills moved from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood to Bedford Stuyvesant. With
all the girls in school, Shirley's mother was able to
(06:43):
work again and she got a job as a domestic.
Shirley became responsible for her younger sisters, so she would
pick them up to go home for lunch, take them
back to school, and then after school she would pick
them up again and look after them until after their
mother got home. Ruby was still really involved in her
daughter's vibes in their education, though sometimes she would do
her daughter's chores so that they could spend more time
(07:04):
on their school work, and then she also took them
on regular trips to the public library and asked them
lots and lots of questions about the books that they
were reading before their next trip. Shirley entered Girls High
School in Brooklyn in nineteen thirty nine, and she graduated
in nineteen forty two. She excelled there and she got
scholarships to Vassar and Oberlin, but the st Hills could
(07:25):
not afford to pay for room and board at either
of those schools, so instead, Shirley entered Brooklyn College in
the fall of nineteen forty two. The racial disparities that
Shirley had experienced in her education so far continued when
she got to college. Even though Brooklyn had a significant
black population, there were only about sixty black students at
the college. That was out of roughly ten thousand graduate
(07:48):
and undergraduate students. Most of the teachers and administrators were
also white, and the entirety of the student council was white.
When Shirley was growing up, her parents had been very
strict and very focused on her schooling, and that continued
to be true when she started college. During her first year,
she spent most of her time studying, and she did
(08:08):
not have much of a social life. But she really
thrived in college and ultimately joined the Harriet Tubman Society,
the Debating Society, the Brooklyn chapter of the nub A
c P, and the Brooklyn Urban League. She majored in
sociology and minored in Spanish, and she graduated with honors
in nineteen Shirley also started on the path to politics
(08:30):
while she was in college. She joined the seventeenth Assembly
District Democratic Club, and she also met Wesley McDonald holder,
who was known as Mack. During her senior year. He
was a political organizer and was nicknamed the Dean of
Black Brooklyn politics. He would become her political mentor. One
of her professors also told her during class that she
(08:50):
should go into politics, and she replied, you forget two things.
I'm black and I'm a woman. But she did go
into politics, which we were going to talk about after
we first paused for a little sponsor break. After graduating
(09:11):
from college, Shirley st. Hill lived with her parents, who
had saved up enough money to buy a home thanks
to her father's work in a factory during World War Two.
For a while, she struggled to find a job, though
she was very diminutive, I mean just tiny, and she
spoke with a slight lisp, so people had trouble believing
that she was really a college graduate. Repeatedly, she would
(09:34):
interview for jobs that she met the qualifications for, only
to be told that she did not actually meet them.
She was finally hired at Mount Cavalry child care Center
in Harlem, and she worked there from ninety to nineteen
fifty three. She also started a master's degree program in
early childhood education at Columbia Teachers College. She took classes
(09:55):
at night while working at the child care center during
the day. In ninet forty nine, she married Conrad Chisholm,
who had emigrated to the United States from Jamaica. They
moved into a home near Shirley's parents. At first they
hoped to have children, but Shirley had two miscarriages, and
later on she said quote, if I had children, I
couldn't be out here doing what I'm doing now. She
(10:17):
also finished her master's degree in nineteen fifty one. Shirley
Chisholm had been active in the seventeenth Assembly District Democratic
Club since college, and in three she took part in
her first political campaign. A seat had opened up in
the second Municipal Court, which was local to where she lived.
Chisholm worked with the campaign to elect Louis S. Flag, Jr.
(10:39):
Who became Brooklyn's first black judge, which was a huge milestone.
Campaign workers tried to keep this momentum going by reforming
the Flag campaign into the Bedford Stuyvesant Political League or BSPL.
Chisholm became its vice president. Chisholm had noticed that in
all the political organizations she was part of, women were
really active of, but they were also relegated to tasks
(11:02):
like preparing food, cleaning up, and organizing events and raffles.
Many of the organizations were integrated, but essentially segregated themselves
when it came to things like seating arrangements. Chisholm thought
all of that needed to change, so she ran for
president of the BSPL. This led to problems because her
opponent was her long time mentor Mac Holder. She lost
(11:26):
this election, but the fact that she had run against
him at all led to a huge rift between the
two of them. In nineteen fifty eight, at the age
of thirty four, Chisholm left both the Seventeenth Assembly Districts
Democratic Club and the BSPL, feeling frustrated and like as
a woman, she didn't have any future and politics beyond
(11:46):
canvassing and cleaning up after meetings. In nineteen fifty nine,
Chisholm became a consultant to the New York City Division
of Daycare, and in nineteen sixty she returned to politics.
She and several others had been part of the Flag
Campaign started the Unity Democratic Club, which was racially integrated
and which had women in many prominent positions. This eased
(12:09):
some of Chisholm's frustrations, but at the same time, she
was still doing a lot of work campaigning for other people,
when what she really wanted was to be the one
running for office. So in nineteen sixty four, Chisholm told
the Unity Democrats that she wanted to run for state representative.
They nominated her, and she won her first primary and
(12:30):
general election. This wasn't, however, one of her many political firsts.
The first black woman elected to the New York State
Legislature was Bessie Buchanan ten years earlier. While a state
legislator in Albany, Chisholm introduced two major pieces of legislation
that really illustrate what she was trying to do in politics.
The first set up unemployment insurance and social security protections
(12:54):
for personal and domestic workers. This was something she'd seen
a need for both from her mother and from so
many other working women in their Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood. The
second was the SEEK Program, which stands for Search for Education,
Elevation and Knowledge, and it was something she'd seen a
need for during her own education. The SEEK program identified
(13:15):
black and Hispanic students for both financial and academic aid
to study at the City University of New York or
the State University of New York. This program still exists today,
and it works to bridge the gap for financially and
educationally underprivileged students. After a redistricting, Chisholm had to run
for re election in nineteen sixty five, even though her
(13:35):
first term wasn't over. She ran again in the regular
election cycle in nineteen sixty six and was once again reelected.
Her other legislation during those years as a state representative
included funding for daycare centers for the children of working
women and laws to ensure that teachers didn't lose their
seniority if they went on maternity leave. She also advocated
(13:57):
for the repeal of New York's laws criminalizing a board,
which happened in nineteen seventy after she had left office.
These years in the state capital were really challenging for Chisholm.
She spent about five days a week in Albany while
her husband was at home in Brooklyn, and her father
had also died the year before she was elected. She
and her father had been very close, and a lot
(14:19):
of her earliest political opinions had been informed through discussions
with him about figures like Marcus Garvey She had also
become somewhat estranged from her mother and sisters because she
inherited her father's money while they inherited the house. Her
isolation in Albany was professional as well as personal. There
were only a handful of women in the state legislature,
(14:41):
and she was the only black woman. It was socially
unacceptable for women to go out to bars, which is
what most of the men were doing. At the end
of the day. She frequently felt like she was being overlooked,
and this was a pattern in her political career, which
would lead her to say, quote, if they don't give
you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.
In nineteen sixty eight, a court ordered reapportionment created a
(15:04):
new congressional district in New York and that was centered
on Shirley Chisholm's neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant. This newly created
thirteen district was majority black, and it also had a
large Puerto Rican population. It was pretty much taken for
granted that the representative elected from this new district would
be black, but it was also pretty much taken for
(15:24):
granted that it would be a man. Twelve people announced
their candidacy, and Chisholm was the only woman. It was
during this campaign that Chisholm started using the slogan unbought
and unbossed. She also repaired her relationship with mac Holder,
who got in touch and said that he wanted to
be part of her campaign. Chisholm one the Democratic primary
(15:46):
in this election by a huge margin, and then in
the general election, her opponent was James Farmer, who was
running on both the Republican and Liberal Party tickets. Farmer
was the former head of the Congress of Racial Acquire
or CORE, as well as one of its founders. He
had also organized and participated in the Freedom Rides, and
(16:07):
he and a whole lot of other people thought his
election was a sure thing. Chisholm and Farmer agreed on
a lot of their key issues. They had essentially the
same talking points on things like housing, employment, and education.
Both of them were also against the Vietnam War, so
Farmer's campaign was less about the issues and more about gender.
(16:29):
He framed himself as a powerful man whose voice was
needed in Washington and dismissed Chisholm as quote some school teacher.
Farmer wasn't the only person focused on gender and this
During the campaign, the New York Times ran this headline,
Farmer and woman in lively Bedford Stuyvesant Race. That makes
(16:52):
me kind of want to grind my teeth, but I'm
gonna Meanwhile, Chisholm and mac Holder worked day night to
canvas in campaign. They pointed out that Farmer lived in Harlem,
not Brooklyn. Chisholm was fluent in Spanish and reached directly
out to the district's Puerto Rican voters. She emphasized all
(17:12):
the work that she had done in Albany that directly
affected people in Brooklyn, especially women, and women registered voters
outnumbered men as registered voters in the district. And the
middle of all this, though, Chisholm developed a fibroid tumor
and she had to have surgery, so she had to
take a break from the campaign. Farmer started playing up
her absence from the campaign trail until she finally defied
(17:35):
her doctor's orders. She went out on her front steps
with a bullhorn. This required her to walk down several
flights of steps first, and with this bullhorn she said,
ladies and gentlemen, this is fighting. Shirley Chisholm, and I
am up and around in spite of what people are saying.
Oh November five, Chisholm won the election against James Farmer
(17:56):
thirty four thousand, eight five votes to thir teen thousand,
seven hundred seventy seven. She became the first black woman
elected to Congress and only one of ten women in
Congress that year. The only other woman of color was
Patsy Mink of Hawaii, who was Japanese American and the
first woman of color elected to Congress. There were also
(18:18):
only ten black legislators in Congress that year. We will
talk about her time as a representative and her run
for the presidency after another sponsor break. When Shirley Chisholm
took office as a US Representative from New York number one,
(18:41):
she referred to herself as a black woman congressman, which
delights me. She also recognized the role that women had
played in getting her elected, and she recognized the fact
that women were largely being excluded from Washington politics. So
to try to start closing that gap in her term,
she hired only women for her staff. At the same time,
(19:04):
she knew that as a junior legislator, she really needed
experienced people to help her in order to be effective,
so a lot of the women she hired had served
on the staff of Joseph Resnick, who had elected not
to run for re election. Almost immediately after being sworn in,
Chisholm started breaking protocol. In Washington, it was expected for
junior legislators to basically listen and not make waves. But
(19:28):
when she got her committee assignment, it was to the
Rural Development and Forestry Committee of the Agriculture Committee. This
was completely outside her experience and also not particularly relevant
to her constituents back in Brooklyn, New York. She thought
this was ridiculous, and she tried to be recognized to
speak to protest it, but every time she stood up,
(19:49):
a more senior representative would stand up and be called on. Finally,
she walked down to the well at the floor of
the House, and when asked what she was doing down there,
she said, quote, I've been trying to get recognized for
half an hour, Mr Chairman, but evidently you were unable
to see me, so I came down to the well.
I would just like to tell the caucus why I
(20:09):
vehemently reject my committee assignment. This was really unheard of.
It was not done among junior legislators especially to do
something like this, but she was ultimately reassigned to the
Veterans Affairs Committee. This was definitely not her first choice,
but it was at least a place where she felt
like she could serve her constituents because there were plenty
(20:30):
of veterans living in Brooklyn. From there, Chisholm continued to
take bold, uncompromising steps. Her first speech in the House
was anti war, and she announced that she would vote
no on every budget bill until the country started using
its resources quote for people and peace, not profits in war.
She also faced a lot of sexism, like questions about
(20:52):
what her husband thought about what she was doing, and
a very like what does your husband think of all this? Darling?
In July of nine seventy, during hearings on a House
anti discrimination measure, Chisholm said quote, during my entire political life,
my sex has been a far greater handicap than my
(21:15):
skin pigmentation. From my earliest experience in ward political activity,
my chief obstacle was that I had to break through
the role men assigned women. A young woman in a
newspaper story I read somewhere defined that role beautifully. She
was talking about her experiences in the civil rights movement. Quote,
we found that the men made the policy and the
(21:37):
women made the peanut butter sandwiches. I would like to
comment on this quote really quickly before we move on,
because a lot of people take this out of context
and try to make it be a statement that in general,
in the world, gender is a bigger issue than race,
and that's really not what she was saying. She was
(21:57):
confining this to her political life very clearly, not like
a blanket statement about which thing, being a woman or
being black is harder. Chisholm's agenda in Congress was ambitious,
but it wasn't naive. She wanted more programs for the
poor and unemployed, more support for education, more funding for
(22:19):
health care, and protections for civil rights. She helped form
the Congressional Black Caucus and later the Congresswoman's Caucus, which
is now the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues. On August tenth,
nineteen seventy she reintroduced the Equal Rights Amendment, which was
passed by Congress on March twenty two, nineteen seventy two,
(22:39):
but was not ratified by the states. That could be
a whole other podcast, and maybe will be at some
point in the future. When Chisum ran for re election
in nineteen seventy, she won eighty two percent of the
vote than In nineteen seventy one, she published her autobiography,
which was titled Unbought and Unbossed. By the time Unbought
and unbod came out, Chisholm had already been thinking about
(23:03):
running for president. In November of nineteen seventy two, she
told her staff that she planned to run. That same year,
she was appointed to the Education and Labor Committee, which
had been one of her top choices when she was
first elected. Don't announced her intention to run for president
on January nine, seventy two at Conquered Baptist Church in Brooklyn,
(23:24):
and her speech she said, quote, 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 I am
equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people,
and my presence before you now symbolizes a new era
in American political history. With this announcement, Chisholm became the
(23:45):
first black woman to seek the nomination of the Democratic Party.
Sometimes you'll see her listed as the first woman of
any race to seek the nomination for any major political party,
but that is not accurate. Margaret Chase Smith ran for
president as a Republican in eighteen sixty four and had
twenty seven delegates at the Republican National Convention. Patsy Mink,
(24:06):
who we mentioned earlier, also ran as a Democrat in
nineteen seventy two. She had been invited by Oregon Democrats
to run on their ballot to draw attention to the
movement against the Vietnam War, and she withdrew after the
Oregon primary. This has been described as more of a
symbolic campaign, but it still counts as it happened. In
her run for Congress. Chism faced all kinds of sexism
(24:27):
while running for president. Walter Cronkite started a news broadcast
about her candidacy by saying, a new hat, rather a bonnet,
has been thrown into the ring. She was also excluded
from televised debates and took her case to court, at
which point the FCC ordered that she be invited to
debate as well. And it wasn't just gendered language and
(24:49):
exclusion from debates at least three confirmed assassination threats were
made against Chisholm. During the campaign. Someone stole stationary from
one of her opponents and ped up a terribly spelled,
badly written press release claiming that she had been in
a mental institution. This release went on with a whole
series of completely fabricated claims and led to an FBI
(25:12):
investigation as there was obviously racism and sexism all tied
together in the response to her campaign. But in this campaign,
Chisum really hoped to build a coalition among anyone who
was disenfranchised or marginalized, not just black people and not
just women. She was also vocal in her support of
equal rights for Hispanics and Latinos, as well as gay
(25:35):
people and Indigenous people. She had called to have a
Native person leading the Department of the Interior, which oversees
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and she did get a
lot of grassroots support. Many of the people who worked
on her campaign were first time participants in this process.
Whenever people asked her what they needed to do to
get involved, she would tell them the first thing was
(25:56):
to register to vote, and this was just a few
years after the voting rights Act of nineteen sixty five
outlawed voting discrimination based on race. But her efforts on
the campaign were really hampered by a lack of money
and by disorganization from within the campaign. She had some
high profile celebrity backers like Harry Belafonte and Aucie Davis,
(26:16):
but other people weren't as enthusiastic even when they said
they were on her side. Glorias steinhum ran as one
of her delegates in the New York primary, but kept
doing this kind of half hearted endorsement, saying that she
was for surely Chisholm, but thought George McGovern was the
best of the male candidates. Tis Um finally told her
to either endorse McGovern or her not do this weird
(26:39):
in between thing, and she said, quote, don't do me
any favors by giving me this semi endorsement. I do
not need this kind of help. She also faced criticism
after candidate George Wallace was shot on May fifteen, nineteen
seventy two. We've done a podcast on Wallace before, in
case you needed any of that story. Uh. He was
notorious for his youth on segregation and race, although during
(27:02):
this campaign he announced that he would no longer support segregation.
Chisholm visited him in the hospital, and people were appalled,
but she felt like visiting was just the humane thing
to do, and she told him, quote, you and I
don't agree, but you have been shot and I might
be shot, and we are both children of American democracy,
so I wanted to come and see you. The Democratic
(27:24):
National Convention that year started on July temp and by
that time it was absolutely clear that there was no
way Chisholm was going to get the party's nomination. Instead,
she hoped to have enough delegates to influence the party
platform that would be created at the convention. She wound
up with a hundred and fifty two delegates, which is
about ten percent of the total after being on the
ballot in twelve states. That was more than some of
(27:47):
the other candidates, but not enough to have an impact
on the party platform or her much bigger goal of
naming a black candidate as the vice presidential running met.
She was also really disillusioned by how the process felt
more like it was about candidates making deals with one
another for their delegates than it was about candidates trying
to do right by the voters. But a more personal
(28:08):
disappointment was that her friend and colleague Ron Delum's of
the Congressional Black Caucus, was supposed to be the person
to nominate her at the convention, but he backed out
at the last minute. Her friend Percy Sutton did it instead.
On the last night of the convention, Shirley Chisholm gave
a speech and which she said she would support the
Democratic Party nominee George McGovern, But before she could give
(28:32):
that speech, she got a lengthy standing ovation. Even though
there were so many disappointments at the Democratic National Convention,
Chisholm insisted that she did not regret her decision to run.
She said, I ran because somebody had to do it first.
I ran because most people thought the country was not
ready for a black candidate, not ready for a woman candidate. Someday.
(28:54):
It was time in nineteen two to make that someday come.
Later on, she described her into the sea as not
exactly opening the door for other women and people of color,
but at least leaving the door ajar. In the nineteen
seventy two election, George McGovern was defeated colossally by incumbent
Richard Nixon and just a huge landslide like an unmatched landslide.
(29:19):
We all know how that worked out. Though, Chisholm returned
to her seat in the House of Representatives, and she
spent seven total terms in the House. In nineteen seventy five,
she co sponsored a bill to expand the federal school
lunch program, and then she led the representatives to overturn
President Gerald Ford's veto of it. In nineteen seventy seven,
she also became part of the House Rules Committee. She
(29:40):
was the first black woman to be on that committee.
In her personal life, she and Conrad Chisom divorced in
nineteen seventy seven and she remarried Arthur Hardwick Jr. Who
lived in Buffalo. And her later terms in the House
of Representatives, Chisholm didn't defy protocol in the way she
had in her first and over the years the shifts
started to draw more and more scrutiny. What she saw
(30:03):
as an attempt for consensus building was seen as being
too conciliatory and not ambitious enough. She was also criticized
for increasing time away from Washington. Some of this was
to go on speaking tours, and some of it was
to be with her second husband. After he was permanently
and seriously injured in a car accident. All of this
influenced her decision not to seek re election in nineteen two,
(30:27):
but she was also frustrated by feeling like she was
less and less able to really serve her constituents. Some
of this was due to the shifting political climate of
the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties. Her career
had really been focused on helping the needy and protecting
the marginalized, things like an increased minimum wage, unions for
domestic workers, racial equality, gay rights, and daycare for working
(30:51):
mothers and people on public assistance. But it was harder
and harder to get legislation like that past. On top
of that, for a number of economic and social reasons,
voters in her district and in similar districts all around
the country were becoming less and less engaged and politically active,
and that was making it a lot more difficult for
(31:11):
her to secure federal funds that would benefit them. After
retiring from politics, Chisholm became Sherrington Professor of Politics at
Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. She commuted back and forth
between the college and Buffalo, where she and her husband
lived and she helped found the National Political Congress of
Black Women, and she worked on Jesse Jackson's campaign for
(31:32):
the presidency in ninety four and her husband, Arthur died
in nine In Shirley Chisholm was offered the position of
ambassador to Jamaica, but she turned it down because her
health was not good anymore. She died on January one
of two thousand five at the age of eighty, and
November of President Barack Obama posthumously awarded her the Presidential
(31:57):
Medal of Freedom. Later on in her life, she said
that she didn't want to be remembered just as a
member of Congress or a candidate for president, but as
in her own words, a woman who fought for change
in the twentieth century, and that is Shirley Chisholm. Heay
(32:18):
so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this
episode is out of the archive, if you heard an
email address or a Facebook U r L or something
similar over the course of the show, that could be
obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at
I Heart radio dot com. Our old health stuff works
email address no longer works, and you can find us
(32:39):
all over social media at Missed in History and you
can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or
(33:01):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
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Tracy Wilson
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