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Table of Contents
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Summary
- Early Life and Education
- Early Career
- Political Career
- Later Life and Legacy
Key Facts And Information
Let’s know more about Shirley Chisholm!
Shirley Anita Chisholm was an American politician who made history in many ways. She was the first Black woman to be elected to the United States Congress in 1968. She represented New York’s 12th congressional district, which is in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant area. From 1969 to 1983, she was a member of Congress for seven terms. Chisholm was the first Black person to run for a major party’s presidential nomination in 1972. She was also the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. People knew her for being very against economic, social and political inequality and for fighting hard for civil rights for African Americans and women’s rights.
Shirley Anita Chisholm
EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION
- On 30 November 1924, in Brooklyn, New York City, Shirley Anita St. Hill was born to parents who had come to the United States (US) from Guyana and Barbados. She was the oldest of four girls. Charles Christopher St. Hill, her father, was born in British Guiana and lived in Barbados before moving to New York City in 1923. Ruby Seale, her mother, was born in Christ Church, Barbados, and moved to New York in 1921. Charles worked in factories and as a baker’s helper, and Ruby made money as a seamstress and a housekeeper.
- Together with her two sisters, Shirley went to live with their grandmother, Emaline Seale, in Barbados. They took the MS Vulcania to their grandmother’s farm in Vauxhall, Christ Church, where Shirley went to a one-room schoolhouse. On 19 May 1934, she returned to New York on the SS Nerissa. She lived in Barbados for a long time, which gave her a West Indian accent and shaped who she was. She later called herself a Barbadian American. Chisholm wrote in her autobiography Unbought and Unbossed (1970) that her strict British-style schooling on the island helped her become a good speaker and writer. She was also raised in the Quaker Brethren faith and later went to a Methodist church.
- Shirley went to Girls’ High School in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighbourhood starting in 1939. She did very well in school and was vice president of the Junior Arista honour society.
- She received scholarships to Vassar College and Oberlin College, but her family could not afford to cover her living expenses, so she attended Brooklyn College and commuted from home. In 1946, she graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and a minor in Spanish, which she sometimes used in her political work.
- She joined the Harriet Tubman Society and the Delta Sigma Theta sorority at Brooklyn College. There, she worked to make the college more inclusive, pushed for African-American history classes, supported the integration of Black soldiers in World War II, and encouraged more women to take on leadership roles in student government. Her interest in politics and activism came from her childhood, when her father supported Marcus Garvey and workers’ rights. She also learnt about labour and independence movements in Barbados.
- She met Conrad O. Chisholm, a Jamaican immigrant who became a private investigator, in the late 1940s. In 1949, they got married in a big West Indian-style ceremony. The couple did not have kids, partly because she had two miscarriages, but some experts think her desire to have a career may have played a role as well.
- Chisholm worked at the Mt. Calvary Child Care Centre in Harlem from 1946 to 1953, first as a teacher’s aide and then as a teacher. She worked during the day and went to school at night. In 1951, she got her Master of Arts in Childhood Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.
EARLY CAREER
- Chisholm was the director of the Friend in Need Nursery in Brownsville, Brooklyn, from 1953 to 1954. From 1954 to 1959, she was the director of the Hamilton-Madison Child Care Centre in Lower Manhattan, where she was in charge of 130 kids aged three to seven and 24 staff members. From 1959 to 1964, she worked as an educational consultant for the Division of Day Care in New York City’s Bureau of Child Welfare. She was in charge of ten day-care centres and started new ones.
- Chisholm gained knowledge in early education and child welfare policy through this work. She got involved in politics in 1953 when she helped Wesley ‘Mac’ Holder’s campaign to get Lewis Flagg Jr. elected as Brooklyn’s first Black judge. The Bedford–Stuyvesant Political League (BSPL) grew out of that campaign. The organisation fought for civil rights, against housing discrimination, and for more economic and social services in Brooklyn. Chisholm eventually left the group around 1958 because she and Holder disagreed because, while Holder sought to give women more roles in the group, Chisholm resisted what she saw as token gestures and pushed instead for women to have genuine, independent power.
- Chisholm also volunteered with mostly white political groups in Brooklyn, like the League of Women Voters and the Brooklyn Democratic Clubs. She was on a committee that chose the winners of the BSPL’s annual Brotherhood Award. She was also the Brooklyn branch’s representative for the National Association of College Women. Chisholm wanted to change the way politics worked, especially by getting more people of colour involved in the Brooklyn Democratic Clubs. Her work to get more Black people to join the 17th District Club and, by extension, get involved in local politics was successful. Chisholm joined the Unity Democratic Club (UDC) in 1960. Thomas R. Jones, who had worked on the Flagg campaign, started the club.
- The UDC differed from many other political groups because it was open to people of all races, comprised middle-class individuals and had women in leadership positions. Chisholm campaigned for Jones when he ran for the assembly. He lost in 1960 but won in 1962, making him the second Black state assemblyman from Brooklyn.
POLITICAL CAREER OF SHIRLEY CHISHOLM
- Chisholm ran for Jones’s seat in the New York State Assembly in 1964 after he chose to become a judge instead of running for reelection. The Unity Democratic Club (UDC) did not want to help her because she was a woman, so she went straight to women voters and used her position as president of the Brooklyn branch of Key Women of America to get their support. In June 1964, Chisholm won the Democratic primary. In December, she got more than 18,000 votes, which was more than her Republican and Liberal opponents, and won the Assembly seat.
- Chisholm was a member of the 175th, 176th and 177th New York State Legislatures from 1965 to 1968. Early on in her time in office, she fought the state’s English-language literacy test, pushed for more Black people to be on Assembly committees, and was able to get unemployment benefits for domestic workers.
- She also initiated New York’s version of the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) programme, which provided extra support to underprivileged students in gaining college admission. She was chosen to be New York State’s Democratic National Committeewoman in 1968.
- Chisholm ran for the US House of Representatives in the newly redrawn 12th congressional district, which was centred on Bedford-Stuyvesant, that same year. She ran for office with the slogan ‘Unbought and Unbossed’ and beat State Senator William S. Thompson and labour leader Dollie Robertson in the Democratic primary.
- In the general election, she beat James Farmer of the Liberal Party, whom Republicans supported. She became the first Black woman to be elected to Congress. Chisholm was first put on the House Agriculture Committee, where she used her position to fight hunger by working with Bob Dole to expand food stamps and help start the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC).
- Later, Chisholm got a spot on the Education and Labour Committee, where she became the third-highest-ranking member by the time she retired. She made it a point to hire women, especially Black women, for her staff. In 1971, Chisholm helped start both the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus. She helped write the Health Security Act, which would provide healthcare for everyone, and she, along with Bella Abzug, introduced a $10 billion child care bill.
Founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus with Chisholm (seated, second from right).
- A changed version of the bill passed Congress, but US President Richard Nixon vetoed it in 1971. Chisholm announced her run for president in 1972. She was the first African American to run for a major party’s nomination and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s nomination.
- She ran as ‘the candidate of the people’, but her campaign did not get much money, support from her party, or help because she was a woman. Even though there were threats to her safety, she campaigned in 14 states and got 430,703 votes (2.7% of the total) and 28 delegates.
- She came in fourth at the Democratic National Convention with 152 delegate votes. Chisholm remained influential in Congress throughout the 1970s. From 1977 to 1981, she was the Secretary of the Democratic Caucus. She fought for more education, healthcare, women’s rights, Indigenous peoples’ land rights, and against the Vietnam War, the draft and the growth of weapons. She also pushed the women’s movement to help women of colour with their social and economic problems.
- She divorced her husband in 1977 and then married Arthur Hardwick Jr., a former assemblyman and businessman from Buffalo, later that year. Some liberals criticised her in the late 1970s because they thought she sided too often with Democratic Party leaders instead of progressive challengers. Chisholm decided not to run for reelection after Hardwick was severely hurt in a car accident in 1979.
- In 1982, she said she was retiring because she wanted to take care of her husband and because she was angry that US President Ronald Reagan’s administration was not listening to her constituents. She said that the accident made her reevaluate her life and career, and she was excited to return to teaching instead of pursuing a career in politics.
LATER LIFE AND LEGACY OF SHIRLEY CHISHOLM
- Chisholm moved to Williamsville, New York, near Buffalo, after leaving Congress in January 1983. She wanted to go back to school and run for president of Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and City College of New York, but her political opponents stopped her. Albert Shanker, head of the teachers’ union and a long-time enemy, also opposed her possible appointment as New York City Schools Chancellor. Instead, she received numerous job offers and accepted the Purington Chair at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where she taught from 1983 to 1987.
- She taught a wide range of subjects and was not limited to one department, just like past Purington Chair holders W. H. Auden, Bertrand Russell and Arna Bontemps. She said she liked the challenge of sharing her feminist point of view and personal experiences with mostly rich white students when asked why she chose to teach them.
- She also taught at Spelman College in Atlanta in the spring of 1985. She taught classes such as Congress, Power and Politics, and History of the Black Woman in America. Chisholm and C. Delores Tucker started the National Black Women’s Political Caucus in 1984 to bring attention to the issues that women of African descent were facing during Geraldine Ferraro’s campaign for vice president.
- Chisholm was the first chair of it. The group changed its name to the National Political Congress of Black Women after a fight with another group with a similar name. Later, it was shortened to the National Congress of Black Women. She spoke at more than 150 colleges in the 1980s, giving lectures regularly. She told her students to accept differences and not become polarised. She stressed that knowledge is useless without accepting others.
- She also told minority groups to get more involved in politics at the local level and backed Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. She helped start African-American Women for Reproductive Freedom in 1990 with 15 other Black leaders. Chisholm’s personal life was full of sadness when her husband, Arthur Hardwick Jr., died in August 1986. In 1991, she moved to Florida. President Bill Clinton chose her to be the US Ambassador to Jamaica in 1993, but she could not do it because her health was getting worse. She was also inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame that year.
- Chisholm died at her home in Ormond Beach, Florida, on 1 January 2005, after having a series of strokes the year before. At her funeral in Palm Coast, Florida, the minister praised her as a woman who ‘showed up, stood up, and spoke up’. The Birchwood Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo is where she was buried. Her campaign slogan, ‘Unbought and Unbossed’, is on her vault.
Frequently Asked Questions About Shirley Chisholm
- Who was Shirley Chisholm?
Shirley Chisholm was an American politician, educator, and author. She was the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Congress (1968) and the first Black woman to seek a major party’s nomination for U.S. President (1972).
- What did Shirley Chisholm accomplish in Congress?
Elected in 1968, she served seven terms (1969–1983), championing education, childcare, women’s rights, and racial equality. She was a founding member of both the Congressional Black Caucus and the National Women’s Political Caucus.
- What was her presidential campaign about?
In 1972, she ran for the Democratic nomination under the slogan “Unbought and Unbossed,” advocating for civil rights, social justice, and equality. Though she did not win, her campaign broke significant barriers.