Shirley Chisholm:
Unbought and Unbossed

Shirley Anita St. Hill is born in Brooklyn in 1924 to Barbadian immigrants. As a child, she spends years in Barbados with her grandmother — an experience she credits with giving her a British colonial education that was academically rigorous and instilled in her a belief that a Black woman had no automatic ceiling on her ambitions. She returns to Brooklyn, attends Brooklyn College on a scholarship, and becomes a teacher and early childhood education advocate.

She enters Brooklyn politics through Democratic Party club organizing — learning the machine from the inside. In 1964, she wins a seat in the New York State Assembly. In 1968, running in the newly created 12th Congressional District in Brooklyn, she becomes the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. Her campaign slogan: "Unbought and Unbossed." She enters Congress and immediately demands assignment to the Agriculture Committee — unexpected for a Brooklyn representative — because her district has hungry people and she intends to address food policy.

In January 1972, Chisholm announces her candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination — the first Black person and the first woman to seek a major party presidential nomination. She runs on a platform of ending the Vietnam War, universal healthcare, guaranteed income, and equal rights. She runs against not just white male opponents but against an establishment — including much of the Black male political leadership — that views her campaign as a distraction or an embarrassment.

Black political leaders largely fail to support her, preferring to negotiate with more "electable" white candidates. The Congressional Black Caucus — which she helped found — does not endorse her as a bloc. Men like Jesse Jackson and Rep. Charles Diggs back other candidates. Chisholm is furious: she argues that if Black politicians won't support a Black candidate when they have one, they have no leverage with anyone. She later says she faced more discrimination as a woman than as a Black person during the campaign.

At the Democratic National Convention, she wins 152 delegates — nearly 10% of the total needed. George McGovern wins the nomination. Chisholm's campaign demonstrates both the possibility and the obstacles: she competed, she won delegates, and she was systematically undermined by the establishment she was trying to move.

Chisholm serves seven terms in Congress, retiring in 1983. She co-founds the National Women's Political Caucus and remains one of the most important voices for poor people's issues in Congress throughout the 1970s. She teaches at Mount Holyoke College after retirement. She is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously by President Obama in 2015.

Her legacy runs directly through every subsequent Black political milestone. Barack Obama has said that Chisholm's campaign was the precedent that made his possible. Hillary Clinton cited her in her 2016 campaign. When Kamala Harris became the first Black woman vice president in 2021, she explicitly invoked Chisholm in her victory speech. The trail Chisholm blazed in 1972 — running as a Black woman for the highest office, taking the argument seriously when the establishment did not — is the trail every subsequent figure has walked.