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Barbadian-American politician Shirley Chisholm leveraged her immigrant cultural identity to gain constituents among Brooklyn’s polyglot immigrant communities during her campaign for Congress in the 1960s and during her 1972 bid to become the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. Chisholm’s legacy as the first black woman to seriously run for president is part of the rich history leading to the election of America’s first black president (with immigrant roots) Barack Obama. Chisholm’s understanding of her political identity was complex. Although she expressed pride in her immigrant, racial, and gendered identity, she also employed humanist and universalist speech to transcend these socially constructed categories. While appropriating political rhetoric from the very recent civil rights movement and ongoing feminist activism, Chisholm self-consciously presented herself as a spokesperson for all working-class people, regardless of race and gender. “I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement, although I am a woman and I am equally proud of that,” Chisholm pronounced in 1972. “I am the candidate of the people of America.”

This chapter examines Flo Kennedy’s leadership in creating a black feminist movement to challenge the critical linkages between all forms of oppression, especially racism and sexism. By 1972, while she was excited about the growth of the predominantly white feminist movement, she was also profoundly disappointed that the struggle still did not fully embrace a black feminist position and make challenging racism as well as sexism central to its political agenda. Thus, Kennedy worked to create interracial feminist organizations that emphasized a black feminist praxis. Her activism during this period was central to building a women’s movement that included women of all races as well as an independent black feminist movement. To Kennedy’s thinking, Shirley Chisholm’s quest for the presidential nomination was the perfect opportunity for white feminists to build an alliance and support a black feminist politics. In 1971 she created the Feminist Party in hopes of bringing together an inclusive group of feminists to support not simply the candidacy of the black congresswoman but black feminism more generally. Equally interested in advancing black feminist praxis, she worked to create the National Black Feminist Organization in 1973 and pushed black women to form their own autonomous black feminist movement.

This chapter examines Shirley Chisholm's political career as part of this longer history of African American women in New York City politics. The first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, Chisholm contributed to the breaking down of barriers that kept black women from powerful positions within the federal government. She was a vocal advocate for an activist government to redress economic, social, and political injustices, and she frequently used her national prominence to bring attention to racial, sexual, and class-based inequality. At the same time, she collided into well-established and powerful forces that made it hard to effect change, and she arrived in Congress at the moment when the New Deal coalition began to fall apart. Although her impact as a liberal Democrat would be blunted by the larger political forces surrounding her, Chisholm's influence on the predominantly white women's movement was substantial.

Chapter 2 details the process by which Chisholm went from Black female lawmaker in the U.S. House of Representatives to presidential hopeful. The goal of this chapter is threefold: (1) to advance a theory of symbolic empowerment illustrated by Chisholm’s historic candidacy, (2) to demonstrate the utility of that theory for examining intragroup emotion and political behavior as mutually reinforcing, and (3) to assess ways in which race and gender were pervasive forces affecting almost all aspects of Chisholm’s campaign and people’s reactions to it. Focusing on ways in which her candidacy was rejected by Black civil rights and women’s liberation organizations, this chapter illuminates how future American presidential candidates would be similarly challenged on the basis of race and gender. It relies on archival data, including speeches, congressional files, oral interviews, newspaper clippings, constituent letters, and campaign materials from special collections at Brooklyn College and Rutgers University to inform it.

This chapter sets up the basic dilemma of the Democratic primary contest: how would the competition between an African American man and a white woman affect the liberal coalition of African Americans, white liberals, feminists, and organized labor in place since the 1970s? It decries the deterioration of the Democratic race into a debate over which group, African Americans or women, was more aggrieved and reminds us of the historical consequences of division. Recounting key events from the Civil War era, the chapter argues that the Democratic Party would do better to recall instead the legacy of Shirley Chisholm, who in 1972 ran a principled campaign for president on a platform of antiracist, antisexist, pro-labor, and pro-peace policies.

This chapter examines the evolutionary forces within black politics that paved the way for Barack Obama's ascendency to the White House. It begins by revisiting the campaigns of Shirley Chisholm and Jesse Jackson in the presidential elections of 1972 (Chisholm) and in 1984 and 1988 (Jackson). It then considers the ideological battle between independent black politics and coalition politics, along with its persistence in contemporary black political life in America. It also looks at the rise in local black politics, particularly in Chicago, where blacks went up against the city's well-entrenched Democratic Party.

This chapter examines Flo Kennedy’s crucial leadership role within the nascent feminist movement. The New York City chapter of NOW, which was the largest and most active in the organization, included black feminists Shirley Chisholm as well as white feminists Kate Millet, Betty Friedan, and Catharine Stimpson. As the women’s movement burgeoned, Kennedy’s connections with NOW deepened. She rapidly became a leader, although she never held an official position on the executive committee; instead, she influenced the group primarily through her continual and deliberate mentorship of younger white feminists, such as Ti-Grace Atkinson, and through her ability to imagine actions that would capture media attention.

This concluding chapter recounts the great strides made by African American women in the United States between the 1910s and the 1970s and discusses their progress in more recent years, such as the breaking down of racialized and gendered barriers to political power. At the same time it returns to Chisholm's story and her wistful assertion that “Someday the country will be ready” for an individual who was both black and a woman to run for the presidency. Moreover, the chapter discusses how the history of black women's political activism between the 1910s and the 1970s offers some complicated lessons for activists in more current times, and suggests that, while improvements have been made over the decades, there are still many issues that need to be addressed today—not just in politics, but in other aspects of black women's lives.

In 1982, the author, who worked as a reporter for the black-owned magazine Jet and its sister publication Ebony for fifty-three years, received the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award for “a distinguished career in journalism.” in 1982. He was the first black recipient of the prestigious award and the tenth in a list of honorees that also include Walter Cronkite, Scotty Reston, Vermont Royster, and Herbert Block. Twenty-eight years later, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation presented him with its Mickey Leland Award during its annual conference and banquet. In this chapter, the author recalls the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, from William Dawson and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to Charles Diggs, Robert Nix, and John Conyers. Other blacks who won seats in Congress include Parren Mitchell, Louis Stokes, William Clay, Shirley Chisholm, and Ron Dellums.

In the post–La Guardia era, New York City women politicians experienced some successes but also many frustrations. The “glass ceiling” prevailed: many seemed on their way to higher and more prominent posts, only to be thwarted in the end. Although their quest for power in the early postsuffrage era remained unfulfilled, their story was not all disappointment. Contrary to the stereotypes about woman suffrage—that too few women voted to make a difference, that women voted just as their husbands did, or that women failed to win political office (as if it was their fault)—New York women voters gradually increased their numbers, voted independently from men, and often chose sides with women’s policy agendas in mind. Despite enduring biases against them, hundreds entered partisan political arenas, drawing strength, example, and tactics from their suffrage-era networks and forming strategic coalitions across racial, class, and ideological lines to achieve specific goals.