Black Women and Politics in New York City

Conclusion

s Conclusion In her autobiography, The Good Fight, which documents her run for the nation’s highest office, Shirley Chisholm poignantly recounted the speech she gave at the Democratic National Convention in July 1972. “What I said that night was that most people had thought I would never stand there, in that place, but there I was. All the odds had been against it, right up to the end,” she wrote. “I never blamed anyone for doubting.The Presidency is for white males. No one was ready to take a black woman seriously as a candidate. It was not time yet for a black to run, let alone a woman, and certainly not for someone who was both. Someday . . . but not yet. Someday the country will be ready,” Chisholm maintained somewhat wistfully.1 I have argued through the telling of this new narrative of black women’s politics, that Chisholm’s election to Congress and her presidential campaign concluded an important dimension of black women’s political history. Yet her achievements also marked the beginning of a fresh chapter which is very much still being written. In their campaigns for the U.S. presidency in 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton made important strides forward in breaking down racialized and gendered barriers to political power which Chisholm as a black woman confronted nearly forty years earlier and tried to overcome simultaneously. She would likely have celebrated their achievements, but she would not have been content.The “someday” Chis­ 192 / conclusion holm hoped for when a black woman is elected to the U.S. presidency has not yet arrived, and so the story and the struggle continue. African American Women’s Political Accomplishments At the same time, politically active African American women accomplished a great deal between the 1910s and the 1970s. To begin with, they helped secure women’s right to vote in New York and nationally. Aware that living in the North gave them a tool their Southern sisters could not safely exercise until 1965, African American women in New York City used their votes to help the black communities of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant and, though less acknowledged, also helped themselves gain political clout—slowly, but surely. Specifically, as new voters they deliberated carefully over their political choices and joined with African American men in New York City in migrating from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party starting in the late 1910s. In response to their votes, Tammany Hall began to direct patronage to African Americans. Not only that, through their dogged persistence and increasing political savvy, they began to undermine the Democratic Party’s resistance to running black women as candidates, which was critical because of the party’s near-complete dominance in the city. Although it took until 1954 for Tammany Hall to put its full weight behind a black female candidate, as soon as it did, the candidate, Bessie Buchanan, won. As they forged forward into the deeply masculine domain of party politics, African American women also contributed to the long and as yet incomplete process of wearing down the tightly-linked association of politics with white masculinity. In addition, from the 1930s forward, black women seized the opportunities generated during times of economic, social, and political upheaval to secure positions inside the apparatus of the state that gave them unprecedented access to power brokers and, at times, to the levers of power themselves.As appointees of New York City mayors and New York State governors, for example, they fought for jobs, better housing and schools, safe and clean streets, and for the elimination of racist business practices. While many efforts were unsuccessful, sometimes they secured new laws and policies, and they raised issues on behalf of communities that were too often neglected; not only that, they helped shift and expand the Democratic Party’s focus on racial equality. At the national level starting in the early 1960s, African American women cleared new ground in the liberal establishment while serving on the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, during debates about the Civil Rights Act conclusion / 193 of 1964, by developing the Women’s Job Corps, and on the federal bench. In most of these arenas, they spotlighted the severe economic and social challenges African American women faced because of the intersections of racial and gendered discrimination.While the PCSW offered few specific recommendations to benefit African American women...