When Vice President Kamala Harris and I have spoken in the past about her political influences, one name always comes up: Shirley Chisholm. Harris eagerly expresses her admiration for the late New York Democrat, who, in 1968, became the first Black woman elected to Congress and, in 1972, the first Black woman to mount a serious campaign for the presidency of the United States.
Shirley Chisholm in Her Own Words: Speeches and Writings
By Shirley Chisholm, edited by Zinga A. Fraser
University of California Press, 304 pages
Release date: October 8, 2024
Earlier this year, Harris told me that Chisholm had been a “profound influence” on her from an early age. Growing up in a progressive family that embraced the civil rights and anti-war politics of the 1960s and 1970s, Harris recalled how she became aware of Chisholm’s peace and justice politics. “She was part of my consciousness,” Harris said.
That influence continued as Harris entered politics. “We fashioned some of her imagery from her presidential campaign when I was running for President [in 2020],” Harris said. When she became Joe Biden’s running mate later that year, Harris mentioned Chisholm as one of the Black women who “inspired us to pick up the torch and fight on.” After her election as Vice President, Harris declared, “Shirley Chisholm paved the way for me and so many others.”
It is significant that Harris frequently and warmly recognizes the importance of Chisholm’s legacy, which, even now, is often misunderstood. While the basic facts about Chisholm’s presidential bid are well known, the whole story of her inspired political journey is only beginning to be told. Some of the best of that telling can be found in the new book Shirley Chisholm in Her Own Words: Speeches and Writings.
Chisholm developed her talent for political persuasion on the street corners of Brooklyn, where she won her first elections in the 1960s. Yet, she was also an educator by training and temperament, and her statements were always rich with historical perspective and contemporary insight. She brought a deep critique to discussions of race and gender, poverty and war, and status quo politics, and an impulse toward reform that inspired her to label her own politics as “unbought and unbossed.”
University of California Press
All of this is reflected in the selection of Chisholm’s speeches and writings collected for this volume by Zinga A. Fraser, assistant professor in the departments of Africana Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Brooklyn College, who directs the Shirley Chisholm Project on Brooklyn Women’s Activism. This summer, Fraser co-curated the Museum of the City of New York’s extraordinary “Changing the Face of Democracy: Shirley Chisholm at 100” exhibit, and this fine book is another essential contribution to the historical record that recognizes, as Fraser writes in her introduction, that “the most salient engagement with Chisholm and her politics is through her own writings, speeches, and position papers.”
It is exhilarating to read Chisholm’s visionary reflections on the promise of Black Studies programs, criminal justice reform, sexism and racism in the media, and the importance of building multiracial and multiethnic movements along the lines of what the Reverend Jesse Jackson would eventually describe as a “Rainbow Coalition.” In the announcement of her 1972 presidential bid, Chisholm declared, “Our will can create a new America in 1972: one where there’s freedom from violence and war at home and abroad; where there’s freedom from poverty and discrimination; . . . where we live in the confidence that every man and every woman in America has at long last the opportunity to become all that he was created of being, such as is his ability.”
The 1972 campaign revealed—to Chisholm, and to everyone who had hoped that the activism of the 1960s might frame the governance of the decade that followed—that narrow and petty prejudices remained powerful forces in American politics. Now, more than fifty years later, another presidential campaign will offer a measure of American progress. And one of the candidates, Kamala Harris, the Black woman who could become President of the United States, reminds us that, “Shirley Chisholm paved the way.”