During Women’s History Month, I pay homage to all women, but especially to my sistahs. When Maya Angelou wrote her famous 1978 poem Still I Rise, she reminded us Black women that we come from a long lineage of movers and shakers—women who triumphed not in spite of their challenges, but because of them.
One of those remarkable women was one of my former Congressmembers, Shirley Chisholm—a Democrat from New York whom I personally knew and who shaped my activism.
Chisholm represented my Congressional district in Brooklyn, New York, for seven terms, from 1969 to 1983. She lived in the very neighborhood she represented—and that mattered. In our neighborhood, we kids affectionately called her “Miss C.”
When the 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed, many in her constituency were voting for the first time. In 1969, those newly empowered voters helped make Chisholm the first Black woman in Congress. But that victory didn’t happen by accident. Chisholm understood that democracy had to begin at the grassroots level.
Library of Congress
The Reverend Al Sharpton—whom I grew up with—served as director of the youth division of her 1972 presidential campaign, which I was proud to be a part of. Her campaign turned to us, the neighborhood kids, to reach our parents, urge them to the polls, and make them see that their voices would finally be counted. Chisholm showed the young people in her orbit that activism begins where you stand, and that even the youngest among us can help bend the arc toward justice.
As a daughter of Brooklyn, Chisholm understood our plight. She was a grassroots insider whose multiracial coalition and multilingual approach resonated deeply in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, which at that time comprised mostly disenfranchised Black and Puerto Rican residents. Chisholm connected with everyday people on the bread-and-butter issues that shaped our lives—child care, education, unemployment, housing, food security, and opposition to the Vietnam War. She addressed these concerns in both English and Spanish while visiting our housing projects, churches, parks, and street corners—shaking hands and listening carefully to residents.
As the people’s candidate, she branded herself as “Fighting Shirley.” Throughout the neighborhood, and in the halls of power in New York, she was known as a force to be reckoned with. Her campaign slogan, “unbought and unbossed,” captured her fierce independence and integrity. With it, Chisholm presented herself as a bold alternative to a corrupt and moneyed political establishment.
Black women voters are often lauded as the backbone of the Democratic Party. Shirley Chisholm was instrumental in bringing Black women into the party and into national politics in general—she got us to the polls. Chisholm co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971 and the National Congress of Black Women in 1984 with C. DeLores Tucker, both founded to encourage participation in democratic processes among Black women.
As a voting bloc, Black women have long exercised agency and developed powerful voter mobilization strategies to support our candidates. Our strong voter turnout is rooted in a long history of confronting voter suppression—barriers that the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted white women the right to vote in 1920, did not protect us from. Even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, tactics designed to suppress minority voting persist to this day.
Black women are a powerful voting bloc in both local and national races. In order to represent our communities as elected leaders, we need funding and support from the Democratic National Committee (DNC)—support that Chisholm herself struggled to secure during her campaigns.
Chisholm insisted that our voices must be essential in political debates and in shaping government policy. We are primarily issue voters, and we vote for the world we hope to see. Because our votes matter, our concerns must be addressed—among them reproductive justice, health disparities, gang violence, educational equity, urban environmental racism, and police brutality, to name just a few.
In 1972, Chisholm became the first woman and the first person of color to run for President on the Democratic ticket. Confronted with fierce racist and sexist opposition, she ultimately lost in the primary.
In her 1973 book, The Good Fight, Chisholm explained why she ran: “The next time a woman runs, or a Black, or a Jew, or anyone from a group that the country is ‘not ready’ to elect to its highest office, I believe that he or she will be taken seriously from the start . . . . I ran because somebody had to do it first.”
And those “next times” came. In 1984, U.S. Representative Geraldine Ferraro from Queens became the first woman nominated for Vice President by a major party. In 1984 and 1988, Jesse Jackson ran for President. In 2008, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sought the Democratic nomination. In 2016, Clinton ran again. And in 2024, Kamala Harris carried the torch forward.
When I heard the news that Vice President Kamala Harris was running for President in 2024, I immediately thought about how Chisholm would be proud of this moment. Black women quickly mobilized—the same day her campaign was announced, the Washington, D.C.-based organization #WinWithBlackWomen organized a national Zoom call that drew more than 40,000 sistahs. In just three hours, these women raised more than $1 million for Harris.
In 2024, Harris lost the general election. Yet Harris ran a superb 107-day campaign that injected hope and excitement about what might be possible. It is the way Black women have always moved through history—making a way out of no way. And it was Chisholm who paved the path for those who followed.
Today, Representative Ayanna Pressley, the Democrat who represents my district in Massachusetts, occupies Shirley Chisholm’s old office in Washington, D.C. Pressley is the first Black woman elected to Congress from the state, another milestone in the long arc of representation.
Black women have helped change the United States even as the nation remains mired in its original sin and its enduring legacy of injustice. Time and again, Black women have stood at the forefront of social change—leading coalition building, organizing communities, and modeling intersectional activism.
From Chisholm, I learned that democracy cannot remain an abstract ideal proclaimed in campaign slogans. It must be grounded in the bread-and-butter issues of the day that connect us to the promise of the American dream: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Democracy works only when those relegated to the margins of society—people Chisholm tirelessly fought for—can experience the rights and opportunities that others take for granted as inalienable. Shirley Chisholm taught me that the path toward that democracy begins at the ballot box.