Shirley Chisholm, the candidate nobody could buy and nobody could silence

Shirley Chisholm

Photo: Adam Cuerden / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 30, 1924 Brooklyn
Died	January 1, 2005 (80)
Occupation	Politician
Awards	Presidential Medal of Freedom u00b7 Phoenix Award u00b7 National Women's Hall of Fame

The phrase she made her own — “Unbought and Unbossed” — was never just about the Democratic Party machine she outmaneuvered to win a seat in Congress. It was also about the Black male political establishment that expected her deference, the women’s organizations that borrowed her image without delivering her votes, and every figure who believed that ambition had to wait its turn. Shirley Chisholm didn’t wait.

She grew up between two worlds. Born in Brooklyn in 1924 to Caribbean immigrant parents — a factory worker from British Guiana, a seamstress from Barbados — she was sent at age three to live with her maternal grandmother in Barbados, where the British-style school system gave her the speaking and writing facility that would later distinguish her in the U.S. Congress. That precision with language never left her: when colleagues assigned her to the House Agriculture Committee upon arrival in Washington, she described them as men whose only knowledge of Brooklyn came from “a tree that grew in it.” She went directly to the Speaker’s office, then to the full Democratic caucus, and got the reassignment.

She came to Washington in 1969 as the first African American woman ever elected to Congress, representing New York’s 12th congressional district in an election she refused to lose. The conventional political calendar had her running for the New York State Assembly first — she served from 1965 to 1968 — where she championed the SEEK program that opened the City University of New York to low-income students. The kind of legislation that doesn’t generate many headlines but changes the actual composition of who can enter a room. The congressional run came next, against a Democratic Party machine that hadn’t sanctioned her, and she won anyway.

In Congress, Chisholm’s record was concrete in the way that tends to outlive any symbolic gesture. She pushed for the expansion of food stamps. She was a principal champion of the WIC program — Special Supplemental Nutrition for Women, Infants and Children — that would eventually serve millions of families. She was the leading congressional voice for the 1974 Fair Labor Standards Act amendments that finally extended minimum wage and overtime protections to domestic service workers, most of whom were Black women. Her argument in those hearings was specific: more than half of poor Black families were headed by women, and the majority of those women worked in domestic service, below the federal poverty line, with no labor protections. Congress passed the bill.

In 1972, she became the first Black person and the first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency of the United States. This is the part of the record that generates monuments and film treatments — the 2024 Netflix biopic Shirley, with Regina King in the title role, frames the campaign at length. She entered twelve primaries, received 152 delegates at the convention, and knew from the start that the nomination would not be hers. What is less commonly examined is who failed to back her: the National Black Political Convention in Gary, Indiana, that same year declined to endorse her, with many Black male political figures withholding support. George McGovern’s campaign outmaneuvered her on delegate counts. The women’s liberation movement celebrated her as a symbol while directing organizational resources elsewhere.

She did not take this well, and she was right not to. Chisholm remarked afterward that she faced more prejudice during the campaign because she was a woman than because she was Black. That observation has been quoted extensively; the structural reasons behind it have been examined less. The campaign was not designed to win in 1972. It was designed to prove that the run could be made — to force open a door that the political consensus had decided was permanently sealed. She received 430,703 primary votes. The door did not fully open for decades, but it was never sealed again.

She left Congress in 1983, taught political science and sociology at Mount Holyoke College, and declined an ambassadorship to Jamaica offered by President Clinton. She retired to Florida and died on January 1, 2005, at eighty years old.

What followed has been a slow process of catching up. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2015. Congress approved a Congressional Gold Medal in December 2024. Her centennial year coincided with the major exhibition “Changing the Face of Democracy: Shirley Chisholm at 100” at the Museum of the City of New York, a statue unveiled at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo in May 2025, and a planned monument in Prospect Park, Brooklyn — a 32-foot sculpture designed by Amanda Williams and Olalekan Jeyifous, scheduled for early 2026. It will be the first permanent public artwork in Brooklyn dedicated to a woman.

There is something instructive in how long these recognitions took. Chisholm spent fourteen years in Congress, fought for legislation that directly improved the material conditions of millions of working poor Americans, ran for the highest office in the country before any major party was ready to take that seriously, and wrote two books — Unbought and Unbossed in 1970 and The Good Fight in 1973 — that remain the clearest account of what it cost to be ungovernable in the way she chose. She did not wait for the conditions to be favorable. She made the conditions by refusing to wait.

Tags: 1972 presidential campaign, civil rights, Congressional Black Caucus, Regina King, Shirley, Shirley Chisholm

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