Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics by Anastasia C. Curwood

Reviewed by Michael Woodsworth

Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics
By Anastasia C. Curwood
University of North Carolina Press
January 2023, 472 pp.

Shirley Chisholm was a singular political figure in American history. In 1968, she became the first Black woman elected to Congress. Four years later, she was the first woman and the first Black person to mount a serious campaign for the presidency. A persistent voice for radical social change in America, she also sat on the powerful House Rules Committee — the first woman to do so, of course.

Half a century later, there are 125 women — almost half of them women of color — serving in Congress, a testament to the doors Chisholm battered down. Kamala Harris, Ayana Pressley, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have cited her as an inspiration. Her meme-ified quotes are all over the internet. (Ironically, there’s no record of her ever having uttered her most famous saying: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”) Parks have been named in her honor, monuments planned, and, at long last, books written. Chisholm’s radical vision and advocacy on behalf of the marginalized speak directly to our own times.

Until recently, however, “Fighting Shirley” has received far less attention than she deserves. Enter Anastasia Curwood’s Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics. Fifteen years in the making, this is a meticulous, exhaustively researched “cradle to grave” account of Chisholm’s personal and political lives. Curwood aims to transcend the Chisholm mystique, rendering a complex woman who could be self-aggrandizing, who feuded with her family, and who was willing to “sacrifice personal connections for political gains.” Chisholm, Curwood writes, was “the daughter of a working-class Barbadian immigrant family who, through ambition and tenacity, became a national symbol of principled fearlessness — and Black feminism — in politics.”

Chisholm was physically tiny, but she had an enormous personality. “She was magnetic,” Curwood writes. “She had a ready smile and a razor-sharp sense of humor with which she could disarm friends and foes alike.” She loved to dance, wore flamboyant fashions, and surrounded herself with young staffers — most of them Black and female — whom she nurtured and mentored. Once an early-childhood educator, she was a powerful orator who used her speeches both to educate and inspire. Because of her gender and appearance, she was too often dismissed in the press and demeaned by male colleagues. “Of my two ‘handicaps,’” she wrote in her 1970 memoir, Unbought and Unbossed, “being female put many more obstacles in my path than being black.”[1] Even allies sometimes belittled her, if unintentionally. (To wit, one former staffer who called Chisholm “kind of a flirt” and “a feminine cupcake with the heart of a lion.”)

She was born in hardscrabble Brownsville in 1924. Her parents struggled to put food on the table in their cold-water flat. At age 4, Chisholm was shipped off to live with her maternal grandmother in Barbados. Young Shirley was, by her own account, already defiant and mischievous, but she thrived in her strict Bajan school and admired her grandmother, a no-nonsense woman who “modeled Black feminist qualities of self-determination and dignity.” Returning to Brooklyn as a 10-year-old, she excelled in school, eventually attending Brooklyn College. Along the way, she met both Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt, whom she would later credit as her feminist role models. Another influence was her father, Charles, who despite having little formal education, read voraciously. A laborer and a union man, Charles immersed his eldest daughter in the black nationalist teachings of Marcus Garvey. Meanwhile, the family bounced around, upgrading to a warm-water flat in Bedford-Stuyvesant, then moving into public housing, and eventually scraping together enough money to “buy house” — the dream of so many West Indian families — in Crown Heights. Both parents worked, and Shirley was often left to watch her two younger sisters. She was domineering and sometimes beat them, presaging family rifts that never healed.

Fresh out of college, Chisholm pursued a career in early-childhood education. By the early 1950s, she had entered the rough-and-tumble arena of Democratic politics, canvassing for Wesley Holder’s insurgent Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League. Brooklyn was rapidly changing, and Black Brooklynites, especially those with roots in the Caribbean, were using their growing demographic clout to challenge entrenched, and often segregated, Democratic clubhouses. Prior to 1962, only two Black Brooklynites had been elected to office at any level; by that time, the borough’s Black population had surpassed half a million people. Curwood delves deep into the feuds, rivalries, and machinations that defined Chisholm’s rise, complicating the “unbought and unbossed” image Chisholm would later cultivate. She made her name as a reformer, working with Thomas Jones and the Unity Democratic Club (UDC) to take on party regulars in the 17th Assembly District. Yet she also cut deals with the machine when it suited her purposes. Elected to the State Assembly with the UDC’s backing in 1964, she immediately alienated allies by refusing to back a UDC-aligned candidate for State Assembly speaker.

Meanwhile, Chisholm was building a loyal grassroots following, especially among the Black women who ran the PTAs, civic clubs, and block associations of Central Brooklyn. That following would propel her to higher office in 1968. Until then, a carefully gerrymandered Congressional map had given Brooklyn an all-white delegation in the U.S. Capitol. That changed when a court decision created a new, majority-black 12th District. The 1968 race to become Brooklyn’s first Black member of Congress pitted Chisholm against James Farmer, national leader of CORE. Farmer’s celebrity, mixed with a good dose of misogyny, led outsiders to assume he’d win the seat. (“Farmer and Woman in Lively Bedford-Stuyvesant Race,” read one New York Times headline.) But Chisholm campaigned relentlessly, wooing not only Black constituents but also Italian, Polish, and Jewish voters in a district that stretched all the way from Crown Heights to Greenpoint. She also used her fluent Spanish — a point of pride — to reach her Puerto Rican constituents. In fact, as Curwood shows, it was support from non-black voters that ultimately gave Chisholm her margin of victory.

Chisholm entered Congress as a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, a staunch defender of the Great Society, an advocate of expanded welfare benefits, and an unapologetic feminist. Despite her reputation as a “fiery idealist,” Curwood argues, she was also “ruthlessly pragmatic.” Chisholm was a coalition builder: she helped to found the Congressional Black Caucus as well as the National Women’s Political Caucus. She also caused a stir by making common cause with political foes, including, most notoriously, George Wallace. Her signature achievement in Congress was a 1973 bill — first vetoed, then later signed into law by Richard Nixon — that raised the minimum wage from $1.60 to $2.30 and, crucially, extended wage protections to some 20 million domestic and farm workers. This was “black feminist power politics” in action.

The 1972 presidential primary run remains Chisholm’s signature moment. It was also her most frustrating defeat. Though she knew she had no realistic shot at the Democratic nomination, Chisholm aimed to mobilize voters “who were Black, female, young, poor, or all four.” She campaigned energetically in large states like Florida, California, and New York, hoping to earn enough delegates to influence the party platform and extract promises from the eventual nominee. Her wish list included “a Black Vice-President, a female Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, and an Indigenous Secretary of the Interior.”

From the outset, she met with surprisingly staunch opposition. Black male politicos such as Julian Bond, Walter Fauntroy, and erstwhile allies on the Congressional Black Caucus resented that she’d thrown her hat into the ring without consulting them first. (The Black Panther Party did endorse her, however.) Leading feminists, meanwhile, viewed her campaign as too much of a longshot to merit their endorsement. Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem, among others, supported Chisholm early on but ultimately backed George McGovern. In the end, Chisholm won only 2.7% of votes. But she had made her point. As she wrote in The Good Fight:

I ran because someone had to do it first. In this country everybody is supposed to be able to run for president but that’s never really been true. I ran because most people think the country is not ready for a black candidate, not ready for a woman candidate. Someday…[2]

Chisholm may have been a transformational figure, but, as Curwood shows, she was also a product of her times. Her rise, accomplishments, and setbacks match, almost too perfectly, the arc of 20th-century American liberalism. She left office in 1983, exhausted by the “tedious and frustrating” work of serving in Congress during the Reagan Revolution and the “nonstop sniping” among fellow Democrats back in Brooklyn. She would dedicate her retirement years to teaching, lecturing, and organizing the National Political Congress of Black Women. 

Curwood’s book is the first full-length, scholarly biography about Chisholm. It builds on the work of scholars including Joshua Guild, Julie Gallagher, and, especially, Barbara Winslow. (The latter is the founder of the Shirley Chisholm Project at Brooklyn College and the author of an excellent but brief 2013 biography.) One obstacle facing Chisholm researchers is a relative dearth of archival materials; few of her Congressional papers were preserved. “As a historian of Black women and gender,” Curwood writes, “I am accustomed to cobbling together an archive, and I have been able to do just that.” Among her sources are private papers still held by the Chisholm family, to which she gained unprecedented access; the Brooklyn College archive; interviews with former Chisholm staffers; and a rich trove of oral histories carried out by filmmaker Shola Lynch for her 2005 documentary Chisholm ’72.

Curwood is clearly an admirer of Chisholm. The author first encountered her subject as a child, while looking through family photos. One such image is included in the book’s acknowledgments. There is Chisholm, perched on the side of a bed in a Massachusetts hotel room on the campaign trail in 1972. She’s perfectly coiffed and smartly dressed and seemingly doing serious work, but she’s looking up from her papers and laughing along with a small group of much younger people. Among those are the author’s parents: Wendy Curwood, a campaign volunteer, and Steve Curwood, a journalist covering the campaign. Wendy is a white woman, Steve a black man. (Curwood writes that when she first saw the photo, she thought Chisholm might be her father’s sister.) Together they symbolize the twin groups Chisholm tried hard to unite, but whose loyalties were frustratingly hard to pin down.

Chisholm once opined that politics as practiced in America was a “beautiful fraud that has been imposed on the people for years.”[3] And yet, she spent her career playing an inside game. Her career offers a sobering lesson in the limitations of working within the system. But it also offers a well of inspiration from which generations of activists and politicians will continue to drink for years to come.

[1] Shirley Chisholm, Unbought and Unbossed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), p. xiii.

[2] Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight (Harper and Row, 1973), p. 3

[3] Chisholm, Unbought and Unbossed, p. 54.

Michael Woodsworth is an Associate Professor of History at Bard High School Early College, Queens. He is the author of Battle for Bed-Stuy: The Long War on Poverty in New York City (Harvard University Press, 2016).