Black Women and Politics in New York City

5. On the Shirley Chisholm Trail in the 1960s and 1970s

s chapter five On the Shirley Chisholm Trail in the 1960s and 1970s When the Ninety-first Congress convened in January 1969, the Democratic caucus gathered to approve the committee assignments for the new session. Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn, the first black woman elected to the House of Representatives, found her committee assignment unacceptable, and she stood up to protest. Every time I rose, two or three men jumped up. . . . Men were smiling and nudging each other as I stood there trying to get the floor. After six or seven attempts, I walked down an aisle to the “well,” the open space between the front row of seats and the Speaker’s dais, and stood there. I was half afraid and half enjoying the situation. “For what purpose is the gentlewoman from New York standing in the well?” Wilbur Mills, chair of the Ways and Means Committee asked. “I’d been trying to get recognized for half an hour, Mr. Chairman, but evidently you were unable to see me, so I came down to the well. I would just like to tell the caucus why I vehemently reject my committee assignment.”1 Chisholm had clear grounds for complaint. She represented the BedfordStuyvesant section of Brooklyn, one of the poorest urban communities in the nation. Her assignment on the Rural Development and Forestry subcommittee 158 / chapter five of theAgricultural Committee seemed thoroughly inappropriate. She remarked, “I think it would be hard to imagine an assignment that is less relevant to my background or to the needs of the predominantly Black and Puerto Rican people who elected me, many of whom are unemployed, hungry and badly housed.”2 After her protest, Chisholm was reassigned to the Veterans Affairs Committee.3 Chisholm later wrote that several members in the chamber spoke to her sympathetically afterward, but they implied that she had made a huge mistake. One went so far as to say that she had committed political suicide. Her constituents , however, did not think so. Word of her action on the Hill made it back to New York in no time, and the local audience loved it. A headline in the Amsterdam News read,“Shirley Is a 5-Alarm.”The article portrayed Chisholm as a political renegade and an independent fighter. Conveying her sense of urgency and loyalty to her constituents, the new legislator asserted, “I am a woman of action, in action. . . . I know the independence I exhibit is not acceptable to the professional politicians, but is perfectly acceptable to the people of the community who elected me.”4 She simultaneously explained why she would likely be an ineffective legislator, and won the hearts of the people for it. Introduction Shirley Chisholm’s political career, from her grassroots activism in Brooklyn to her election to the House of Representatives and her 1972 campaign for the United States presidency, is part of a longer history of African American women in New York City politics. Before the turn of the century Victoria Earle Matthews, Irene Moorman, and Lyda Newman commenced the struggle for women’s suffrage, contending with racism from white suffragists and gendered hostilities from society more generally.With the vote in hand, women like Layle Lane, Sara Speaks, Ada B. Jackson, and Anna Hedgeman reached higher and strived to represent people who hitherto had little or no voice in Congress. Their goal was finally achieved when Chisholm was elected to the House of Representatives in 1968. Her victory was also a crucial step in the process of breaking down barriers that kept black women from powerful positions within the federal government. Starting in 1961 with the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, Dorothy Height, Jeanne Noble, and Pauli Murray were brought into national policy discussions about women, race, rights, work, and poverty. Then in 1966, President Johnson appointed Constance Baker Motley to the federal bench. By the mid-1960s the Democratic Party had come to consider African American women at least symbolically important participants On the Shirley Chisholm Trail / 159 in the administrative and judicial dimensions of the state. With Chisholm’s election, a black woman finally held a seat in the national legislature as well. Shirley Chisholm carefully navigated the inhospitable political terrain to victory, contending at each step in the process with racial and gender discrimination deeply embedded in the culture. How did she win when others before her had lost? Her political career and professional...