Stuff You Missed in History ClassThis 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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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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H
