CHISHOLM, SHIRLEY ANITA (née St. Hill, 30 November 1924–1 January 2005), Barbadian American educator, activist, and politician who became the first Black woman elected to
the United States Congress. For seven terms, from 1969 to 1983, she served New York State’s Twelfth Congressional District, which at the time was located primarily in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Chisholm was also the first woman and the first African American to campaign for the presidential nomination of a major US political party.
Born in Brooklyn, Shirley was the eldest of four sisters. Both her father, a factory worker, and her mother, a seamstress and domestic worker, had emigrated from Barbados in the early 1920s. When she was five years old, Shirley and her two younger sisters were sent to live with their grandmother at her farm in Barbados, where she excelled at school and developed the Caribbean accent she would retain for the rest of her life. In 1934 she returned to live with her parents in New York and graduated from Girls’ High School in Brooklyn in 1942. During her youth Shirley would often accompany her father, an admirer of Marcus Garvey, to many anticolonial Black-nationalist events.
Though she was admitted to both Vassar and Oberlin colleges with scholarships, Shirley attended Brooklyn College instead owing to her family’s lack of financial resources. There she majored in sociology, honed her forensic skills in the debate club, and cofounded a social club for minorities called IPOTHIA, “in pursuit of the highest in all.” After graduating cum laude in 1946, she worked as a teacher’s aide; became involved in the Brooklyn chapter of the NAACP, the Urban League, and the League of Women Voters; and took night classes at Columbia University, where met her future husband, Conrad Chisholm. They were married in 1949; two years later, she received her master’s in early-childhood education.
Chisholm’s political career began when she joined the Flagg Election Committee, which sought to elect Brooklyn’s first Black judge, Lewis Flagg Jr., who would join the bench in 1953. She was instrumental in transforming the committee into the Bedford Stuyvesant Political League (BSPL) and ran unsuccessfully to be League president in 1958. Soon thereafter Chisholm joined the Key Women of America, becoming president of its Brooklyn chapter, and then the Unity Democratic Club, which in 1962 helped to elect only the second African American state assemblyman in New York. Two years later, when the seat became vacant, Chisholm decided to run. Thanks to strong mobilization of women voters by the Key Women of America, who took to the streets to campaign for Chisholm, she won the 1964 Democratic primary by a wide margin and the general election in a landslide. She would serve four years in the state assembly.
In 1968, as the result of court-mandated redistricting, New York’s Twelfth Congressional District now comprised primarily Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and Chisholm was tapped by local leaders to run for the seat. She defeated her two male challengers in the Democratic primary—her campaign slogan, “Unbought and Unbossed,” would become the title of her 1970 memoir—and won an upset victory in the general election, becoming the first Black congresswoman.
In her early years as a representative, Chisholm successfully protested her assignment to the Rural Development and Forestry Subcommittee of the House Committee on Agriculture, arguing that she represented one of the most urban districts in the country, and was reassigned to the Veterans Affairs Committee and, later, the Education and Labor Committee. She strongly opposed the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War and advocated for abortion rights, universal health and child care, and anti-apartheid legislation, among other progressive causes. She also collaborated with other prominent women to found the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971.
In 1972 Chisholm became the first Black woman to campaign for the presidential nomination of a major US political party. In announcing her campaign at the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, she called for a “bloodless revolution” and ran on an antiwar and antipoverty platform, advocating welfare reform, environmental justice, a new housing program, and an increased minimum wage. The Black Panther Party endorsed her candidacy, but Chisholm’s campaign faced discrimination from mainstream political institutions. She was blocked from participating in Democratic-primary debates and struggled to get on the ballot in many states. With few exceptions, Black men in positions of political power either ignored her bid altogether or were overtly hostile toward her. Chisholm was also disappointed by the lack of mobilization and support from women’s organizations, many of which she helped found. And though she received numerous death threats, her husband Conrad had to serve as her sole bodyguard until Secret Service protection was belatedly given to her in May 1972. Ultimately Chisholm managed to
get on the ballot in only twelve states, earning 2.7 percent of the total vote; she ended up with 152 delegates at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.
Returning to the House of Representatives after her loss on the presidential trail, Chisholm won her seat back with 90 percent of the vote. She continued advocating for increased social spending and veterans’ rights and grew vocal about land rights for Native Americans. She was instrumental in facilitating passage of the 1974 Minimum Wage Law, which extended minimum-wage standards to domestic workers and a larger number of government employees, and was an architect of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children program, established that same year. She also served as secretary of the House Democratic Caucus for four years and, in 1977, became the first Black woman to serve on the House Rules Committee.
In 1977 Chisholm divorced Conrad and married Arthur Hardwick Jr., a former New York State assemblyman from Buffalo. Given that she was now spending much of her time across the state, many began to question her dedication to her Brooklyn district. In addition, some members of Chisholm’s base began to feel that too often she sided with party officials, endorsing candidates whose positions belied her beliefs; in 1978 the Village Voice published an editorial by a former confidant of hers entitled “Chisholm’s Compromises: Politics and the Art of Self-Interest.”
Chisholm retired from Congress in 1982 to help care for her husband, who had been badly injured in an automobile accident a few years before. She was also feeling discouraged by the increasingly conservative tilt of the country as reflected in the presidency of Ronald
Reagan. She settled in Williamsville, New York, and tried to resume her career in education as a college president and as New York City Schools Chancellor but found her way blocked by political opponents. Eventually she accepted a professorship at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, where she taught until 1987. In 1984 Chisholm cofounded the National Congress of Black Women, and that same year she campaigned for the Reverend Jesse Jackson in his campaign for the presidency. Her husband passed away in 1986, and in 1991 she retired to Palm Coast, Florida, continuing to lecture and write. In 1990 she cofounded the African American Women for Reproductive Freedom, and in 1993 President Bill Clinton nominated her to be United States ambassador to Jamaica but she withdrew, citing poor health. That same year she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. Chisholm died on January 1, 2005, at the age of 80, in her Florida home. She was buried in Buffalo.
Over the course of her political career Chisholm was a tireless advocate of the poor and working class, children, students, veterans, and the elderly, and introduced over fifty pieces of legislation to the House of Representatives. She cofounded numerous important organizations furthering the interests of Black Women and wrote two memoirs, Unbought and Unbossed and The Good Fight. Chisholm’s legacy has been memorialized by the Shirley Chisholm Project on Brooklyn Women’s Activism, a historical archive of women’s
local grassroots organizing, including an oral history of her career. Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed, a documentary about her presidential run, won a Peabody Award in 2006. In 2015 Chisholm was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama. And in 2019 Shirley Chisholm State Park, the largest state park in New York City, opened in southeast Brooklyn.