🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
It is now legend, replete with emojis and TikTok memes, that when she was a child, Vice President Kamala Harris's mother told her, "I don't know what's wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?" The point being, as Harris explains, "you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you."
If Harris' campaign is the coconut, then Shirley Chisholm is the biggest branch which grows from a tall trunk grown strong from a decades-long sisterhood of activists, intellectuals, organizers, and leaders who paved the way for Harris to be the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee.
Chisholm, the first Black woman member of Congress, was elected in a newly drawn Black-majority district in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn in 1968. When she was sworn in January 1969, just 11 out of 535 members of Congress were women, and only 11 were Black. Four years later, without asking permission from the party machine, Chisholm jumped into the presidential race. Her announcement speech, made at Brooklyn's Concord Baptist Church, January 25, 1972 heralded her iconoclastic mission:
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 not the candidate of any political bosses or fat cats or special interests. I stand here now without endorsements from many big name politicians or celebrities or any other kind of prop.
I do not intend to offer to you the tired and glib clichés, which for too long have been an accepted part of our political life. I am the candidate of the people of America. And my presence before you now symbolizes a new era in American political history.
Chisholm stormed the country speaking to large enthusiastic crowds of young, multi-racial voters who embraced her message of gender and racial equity, alleviating poverty, and ending the Vietnam war. Run on a shoestring by hundreds of young volunteers, including then 26-year-old (now a 13-term Congresswoman) Barbara Lee and 18-year-old Reverend Al Sharpton.
At the 1972 Democratic convention in Miami, Chisholm accrued only 152 delegates, but she became the first woman in the Democratic Party to have her name placed in nomination.
"When I got to the convention hall," she later wrote, "it was lit up by noise. That was a wonderful moment for me to see the way all of the delegates received me at the convention ... Because I had felt that someday, a Black person or a female person should run for the presidency of the United States, and now I was a catalyst of change."
Chisholm's candidacy may have lacked political practicality, but it succeeded in chipping away at the entrenched culture of racism and misogyny in American politics.
After Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 presidential election, Harris gave a nod in her victory speech to the women like Chisholm "who fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all, including the Black women, who are often—too often—overlooked, but so often prove that they are the backbone of our democracy ... I stand on their shoulders."
Fifty-two years later, Chisholm's legacy lives on, embodied in a woman who is the beneficiary of the women's rights movement that Chisholm boldly spearheaded. Chisholm is joined by a sisterhood of brilliant Black women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Pauli Murray, Frances Beal, Florynce Kennedy, Barbara Jordan, Eleanor Holmes Norton and many others who transferred their experience as skilled civil rights organizers to the early women's liberation movement. Fresh from voting rights drives in Mississippi, and the headquarters of SNCC, and CORE, Black women were the legal architects and moral leaders of the second-wave.
During the four years that bookmarked the height of Shirley Chisholm's political career, between 1968 and 1972, America was at war with itself over Vietnam, which would take over 46,200 American lives by the end of 1972, the civil rights movement in the South evolved into the more militant Black Power movement in urban centers, young hippies rebelled against mainstream society and created their own counterculture, and women—most of whom participated in one or more of these movements for social change—started one of their own.
At the time, women were recognized by both the law of the land and centuries of custom as second-class citizens—the weaker sex physically, psychologically, and intellectually. In 1970, women had three white-collar job options: nurse, teacher, secretary. Women of color had even fewer options, as they were almost universally relegated to domestic work. When women in the workforce got pregnant, they were fired when they started "showing." Pregnant college students were immediately expelled. In 1970, over one thousand women died every year from botched illegal abortions, and as many as 1 million frantic, terrified women risked their lives to obtain illegal abortions—in back alleys, on kitchen tables, blindfolded in secret apartments.
Only seven percent of medical and three percent of law school students were women, and law firms routinely told women (to their faces) that the only jobs for them were as legal secretaries. Women couldn't get their own mortgages or credit cards, that they couldn't participate in most sports contests, or exhibit their art in museums and galleries.
What took place just two generations ago was not just political or legal, social or cultural disruption—it was all of that and more. It was a bedroom and a boardroom and an assembly line revolution—a restructuring of how women and men in America saw each other, a reinvention of roles, and a fundamental identity shift.
There are so many parallels today—a new wave of civil rights (Black Lives Matters) and women's rights (#MeToo) movements, domestic conflict over foreign wars, and a disaffected Gen Z. Now, with 50-years of federal abortion rights wiped out, the past has roared into the present, and there is a new, powerful urgency for women to regain their lost freedom.
Fortunately, Kamala Harris has the winds of history at her back. The groundwork laid by Shirley Chisholm and her generation of diverse feminists might just be solid enough for this country to elect a woman of color for president.
After eight years of backlash and backtracking on women's progress, a Harris presidency would signal the beginning of women taking back the liberties they sacrificed so much for 50 years ago.
Clara Bingham is a former Newsweek White House correspondent and the author of Witness to the Revolution, Women on the Hill, and co-author Class Action which was made into the major motion picture North Country. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her latest book is The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
