A Seat at the Table: The Life and Times of Shirley Chisholm

By Glenn L. Starks

When Shirley Chisholm was asked why she would dare run for president, her response was, why not her?
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm rose from being the child of immigrants to the United States to running for the highest office in the land. She was both the first African American woman elected to the US Congress and the first African American woman of a major political party to make a serious run for president of the United States.
These achievements were not in spite of her background but rather because of it. She persevered by being steadfast in her political convictions and unwilling to compromise on the issues she believed in. Chisholm directly challenged the political establishment and gave a political voice to so many segments of society that were historically ignored—women, racial minorities, young people, the gay community, domestic and agricultural workers, and the poor—not only in her home district in Brooklyn, New York, but across the country.
Her run for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination may not have ended in victory, but it was successful in forging a grassroots campaign that united diverse Americans behind a candidate who championed their collective interests. Her efforts laid the groundwork for change then, now, and in the future.
Without Shirley Chisholm there may not have been a Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Kamala Harris.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: Mar 19, 2024
• ISBN: 9781641609289

Book preview

Introduction

You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm rose from being the child of immigrants to running for the highest office in the land. As a Black woman, she achieved this not in spite of her background but because of it. Thanks to the influence of her parents and her own sheer tenacity, she was both the first Black woman elected to the US Congress and the first Black woman of a major political party to make a serious bid for presidency of the United States. She made history not only for her political runs but also for her accomplishments while in office. She broke down racial and gender barriers, opening the door for so many who have followed, including minorities and women of all colors who have been able to achieve political success because of the precedents she set. In November 2020, for example, Kamala D. Harris became the first woman and first woman of color elected as vice president of the United States.

Chisholm was aware that her legacy would have a lasting impact and once stated, I want to be remembered as a woman . . . who dared to be a catalyst of change. ¹ She was an unapologetic feminist and civil rights champion, unwavering in her support for the issues she believed in. She was direct and presented her policy positions plainly for all to see.

Chisholm attained such success during a time when both Black people and women in this country faced blatant racial and gender discrimination. The few female and Black officials then in office felt they could not challenge the White male establishment or they’d be drummed out of office. Chisholm herself faced discrimination not only from White people, and particularly White men, but also from Black men. Yet she was not afraid to directly challenge the political establishment, which she referred to as the machine.

In doing so, she gave a political voice to so many marginalized segments of society—women, minorities, the young, members of the gay community, domestic and agricultural workers, and the poor—not only in her home district in Brooklyn, New York, but across the country. Her run for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination may not have ended in victory, but it was successful in the way it forged a unified grassroots campaign in which the voices of the previously voiceless joined together to vote for someone who supported their diverse but collective interests. Chisholm’s presidential run—and her broader drive for change—was fueled by her own experiences growing up as the daughter of Black working-class immigrants in a country hostile to all these demographics, and by the strong lessons her family taught her about being dedicated to high principles of integrity and self-respect. When asked why she would dare run for president, she boldly turned the question on its head: Why not me?

This book explores the life of this remarkable individual, discussing the events of her youth that shaped her life, her contributions to education, and the arc of her political career. It also explores her personal life, including the challenges and opportunities that contributed to her becoming an icon of American and even global politics. There are few historical figures who have made such an impact and who continue to influence the political landscape decades after leaving public office. As many historians have pointed out, without Shirley Chisholm’s grit and determination there may not have been a Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Kamala Harris.

1

Chisholm’s Early Life

I wasn’t even born with a brass spoon in my mouth.

Shirley Anita St. Hill was born November 30, 1924, in Brooklyn, New York. Her parents, like thousands of others, had immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s from different parts of the Caribbean, which was then suffering from massive crop failures caused by hurricanes, floods, and drought. These Black immigrants were also escaping systemic oppression by the White European ruling class, which was exploiting their labor to overcome the competition for the Caribbean’s major crop, sugar cane, from other countries such as Brazil. One estimate is that by 1924, over twelve thousand Caribbean immigrants came to the United States each year. ¹

New York City was the hub of immigration to the US, and it was common for immigrants to have family members or friends already living in the city. Tens of thousands of immigrants from Jamaica and Barbados entered through Ellis Island, settling in Manhattan and Brooklyn. From 1900 through 1925, over three hundred thousand immigrants from Barbados immigrated, leading to 16 percent of the city’s population comprising of citizens from the Caribbean by 1930. A distinguishing characteristic of these immigrants was that they were highly literate and skilled. They aspired for education and made up the majority of Black teachers, doctors, dentists, and lawyers in the two boroughs.

Chisholm’s father, Charles Christopher St. Hill, was born in Guyana, then known by its pre-independence name of British Guiana, in 1901. He was orphaned at age fourteen, lived in Barbados for a while and then for a year in Antilla, Cuba, and arrived in New York City on April 10, 1923, aboard the SS Munamar. Chisholm’s mother, Ruby Leona Seale St. Hill, was born in Christ Church, Barbados, in 1901 and arrived in New York two years earlier than her would-be husband aboard the SS Pocone on March 8, 1921. Many immigrated from Barbados during the building of the Panama Canal because it offered good-paying jobs that allowed immigrants to send money back to their home countries. Chisholm’s grandfather was one of those immigrants and sent money home so his daughter Ruby could come to the United States.

Chisholm’s parents met at one of Brooklyn’s Bajan social clubs, Bajan being an English creole spoken widely in Barbados. After following a strict traditional courtship, they were married. Chisholm was the oldest of their four children, all daughters. Two of her sisters, Muriel and Odessa, were born within three years of her. Odessa was born in 1926, while Muriel was born in 1927. The youngest, Selma, was born five years later in 1932. Chisholm was the most vocal child and would later recall that her siblings and mother were sometimes afraid of her mouth. She explained, Mother always said that even when I was three, I used to get the six and seven year old kids on the block and punch them and say, ‘Listen to me.’ I was a fat little thing then, believe it or not. ²

Taking care of their children was financially challenging; it was especially trying for a Black family to find work during the Great Depression. Charles was an unskilled laborer who worked as a baker’s helper and for a factory making burlap bags, but sometimes only a few days a week. Ruby worked as a seamstress out of her home after her daughters were born so close in years. The family couldn’t afford day care or a nursery school. When the children were older, she was a domestic worker for White families. The parents never complained about working so hard; a strong work ethic was part of their Caribbean culture. The children were raised as they were, with discipline, learning to value hard work and to be proud of being Barbadian Americans. These were all lessons that would well serve Chisholm throughout her life.

As most parents do, the St. Hills wanted the best for their children, including an opportunity to pursue their education. So in early 1928, when Chisholm was around three years old, the parents sent her and her two sisters to Barbados aboard the MS Vulcania. Ruby accompanied the girls on the nine-day trip on the tumultuous Atlantic Ocean to live with their maternal grandmother, Emmeline Emily G. Chase Seale, who had visited her family in Brooklyn when Chisholm was an infant. Although a hard decision for the parents, this would allow them both to work and save money for a home and the girls’ educations. The family had originally planned to travel aboard the Vespress, but Ruby changed her mind due to a feeling of foreboding that ended up saving their lives, given that the Vespress sank after setting sail.

Grandmother Emmeline was a tall woman. Standing over six feet with a stentorian voice, she was stern and deeply religious, but loving. Chisholm later recalled how her grandmother preached the virtues of pride, courage, and faith from morning to night. After Emmeline’s first husband died, she married Kirby H. Seale, and Ruby was born in Barbados on August 31, 1901. They owned a farm in the Vauxhall village of Christ Church, Barbados. When the St. Hill children moved there, Barbados was still economically controlled by an oppressive White planter class, and the island’s Black residents were beginning their revolt against British rule. The Black struggle for independence would have a lasting impact on Chisholm’s own views on fighting for equality.

Chisholm’s mother stayed with the girls for six months until they were settled into their new environment. The girls had plenty of company since their maternal aunt, Violet, had also sent her four children to live at the farm until she and her husband were doing better financially in the United States. Chisholm’s uncle Lincoln (Ruby’s younger brother) and aunt Myrtle (Ruby’s older sister) also lived there and helped care for the children. Lincoln was a newspaper editor, which shaped the children’s thinking about the professional possibilities available for Black people. Chisholm later described the family as a strongly disciplined family unit. ³ The home had no running water or electricity, so the family depended on drawing water from a well and read by a kerosene lamp at night. However, the large farm provided space to play and the clear Caribbean water to swim in.

Under her grandmother’s watchful eye, Chisholm attended the one-room Vauxhall Primary School that served as the village’s Methodist church on Sundays. Because the island was still a British colony, the local school followed traditional British pedagogical norms such as wearing school uniforms and teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. However, it was run by Black administrators, and the children were taught by Black teachers. Chisholm later recalled how noisy the schoolroom was, since it was divided into seven sections of teachers simultaneously instructing one hundred students in different grade levels, but it allowed for a great community of learning. Living and being educated in Barbados led to Chisholm having a slight clipped British West Indies accent for the rest of her life. She would always consider herself a Barbadian American and was proud of her heritage. As an adult, for over thirty years she took part in the annual West Indian American Day Carnival Association’s parade in Brooklyn.

As an adult, Chisholm credited her parents sending her to live with her grandmother and being raised in such as strict household following the British style of teaching with contributing to the strong speaking and writing abilities that she would draw on for the rest of her life. Her sister Muriel later recalled, When you started school in Barbados, you went right into reading, writing, and arithmetic. There was no such thing as kindergarten and playing around with paper. You came to learn how to read and write and ‘do sums’ as they said. ⁴

Their grandparents were very religious and took the children to church every Sunday. Emmeline worked as a domestic for a British family, but her farm sustained almost all the basic needs of the family with a variety of vegetables and animals, including cows, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, and turkeys. (During one Christmas, the children were upset one of the turkeys they considered a pet was the main course.) Chisholm attributed so much of her later success to the influence of her grandmother, alongside the examples of Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Chisholm also pointed out, Granny gave me strength, dignity and love. I learned from an early age that I was somebody. I didn’t need the Black revolution to tell me that. ⁵ Both her mother and grandmother were Quaker women who instilled an appreciation for discipline in the young Chisholm. She later noted, I’m very religious, but I don’t wear my religion on my sleeve. Being brought up as a Quaker Brethren, your mind and body are very disciplined. Everything is anchored in God. ⁶

Chisholm and her sisters returned to New York on May 19, 1934, aboard the SS Nerissa. Per the ship’s manifest, their mother, Ruby, went back to Barbados to bring the girls home. The manifest shows they left Barbados on May 11 and reports that when they arrived back in New York, Ruby was thirty-two, Chisholm was nine, Odessa was seven, Muriel was five, and Selma was two. Ruby was listed as a house wife, Chisholm and Odessa were listed as in School, and the other girls each as a Minor.

In the short time the girls had been gone, Brooklyn’s demographic makeup was already starting to become more diverse. The borough’s population was now almost 3 percent Black, and immigrants were almost 35 percent of the population. For the first time, Brooklyn was the largest borough in New York City, and would remain so through 2010. The children had lived in Barbados for six years and barely remembered life in Brooklyn. They returned to the heavily Jewish Brownsville neighborhood during the height of the Great Depression, so their parents continued to financially struggle. The children were sensitive to the cold after living in warm weather for so long. Besides the sometimes-brutal New York weather, they lived in a four-room flat and relied on a coal stove for heating water. When their mother went shopping, the girls would stay in bed to keep warm.

SS Nerissa manifest. Immigration Service, US Department of Labor, 1934, courtesy of Ancestry.com

The family didn’t receive support from government relief programs. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policy was established to provide economic stimulus packages to farmers, the unemployed, and groups hardest hit and to reform the banking and lending industry. However, it did little to improve the economic conditions of Black people in Brooklyn and most other parts of the country. Programs under the New Deal such as those administered by the new National Recovery Administration and Work Progress Administration rarely included support for Black people or women.

The St. Hills couldn’t afford toys for the children, and there weren’t any places for them to play. Chisholm recalled how she and her sisters created their own ways of having fun, such as parroting the local Jewish rabbis as they prayed. Their mother was furious when she caught them.

The girls had to become accustomed to living in the crowded, diverse neighborhood versus the spacious farm. Their densely populated poor neighborhood, with buildings often falling apart, was home to over two hundred thousand Black, Italian, and Puerto Rican people, all living in a two-square-mile radius. Reflecting on her early life, Chisholm would explain that although some called their neighborhood a ghetto, many of the residents were first-generation Jews from Europe who came from much worse conditions. The residents were proud of their heritage and active in protests and progressive politics. Many of the daughters’ friends were Jewish, as the school they attended was predominantly White and Jewish.

Regardless of their socioeconomic status and their parents’ work struggles, the children had a fortunate upbringing. Chisholm later explained that her mother ensured the girls learned poise and grace in addition to their formal education. Their parents used their scant resources to buy the children a piano, and Chisholm would take piano lessons for nine years, doing so well that her parents sacrificed and bought a new piano on credit, paying it off over time.

Her father, Charles, was proud, handsome, intelligent, and an avid reader. He had a keen interest in politics (subscribing to multiple newspapers), unions (he was a member of the Confectionery and Bakers International Union), racism, and British colonialism in the Caribbean. Charles would invite his friends over nightly for lively conversations, and he always kept alcohol on hand for his friends, though he did not drink. While the men debated in the kitchen, Chisholm would lie in bed and listen. Charles would also have conversations with her on race and politics. Later she would reflect that her father was a remarkable man who taught her and her sisters pride in themselves and their race. Charles adored President Franklin D. Roosevelt—who along with his wife, Eleanor, was sympathetic to the struggles of Black people—and believed passionately in the ideals of Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born political activist. This was not surprising, given that Garvey, known as the Black Moses, advocated for Black pride and independence and famously proclaimed, The Black skin is not a badge of shame, but rather a glorious symbol of national greatness. ⁷

Chisholm’s parents enrolled her at PS 24 in 1935, when she was eleven years old. She had always been a bright child, reading the Bible when she was just three years old, learning to write when she was four. However, in school she was a rambunctious student who often got into trouble. She would catapult spitballs using rubber bands. A third-grade teacher luckily realized this was because she was bored and not being academically challenged. An IQ test revealed she was academically gifted, so she was assigned a tutor in history and geography. With that increased attention to her intellectual needs, she fell in love with education and was inspired to make it a lifelong dedication.

The family moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood the next year, when Chisholm was around twelve years old, to another four-room apartment but with larger rooms and steam heat. Unlike Brownsville, which was mostly White and Jewish, Bed-Stuy was roughly half Black. However, it was in this neighborhood Chisholm first encountered racial and ethnic slurs directed at Black and Jewish people. Historically a middle-class White neighborhood, Bed-Stuy’s demographics were rapidly changing, largely owing to the Great Migration of Black people to the area from the US South and the West Indies, all looking for better opportunities in life.

Chisholm witnessed the racial tensions that resulted from the demographic shift. In 1936 the Independent City-Owned Subway System extended its A line, connecting Harlem to Brooklyn. Many Black people embraced their newfound mobility to escape crowded Harlem for the relatively more spacious Bedford-Stuyvesant, resulting in White residents becoming increasingly angry at the growing Black population. Though the neighborhood had been racially segregated since the early 1920s, redlining was used to ensure a strict segregation of Black and White residents. Wilder explains that the result of the purposeful concentration of Black residents between the 1930s and early 1950s was a vast Black ghetto stretched across Brooklyn and was becoming the largest concentration of its kind. ⁸ Chisholm experienced this racism firsthand when she was enrolled at the local PS 28 school, where she faced racial hostility, fear, and resentment from some of her peers and teachers. She later moved on to middle school at PS 178.

Even with all the demographic changes and tensions, the St. Hills prioritized the girls’ education. Each Saturday, Ruby took the girls to the library, where each would check out the maximum three books. At Christmas their gifts would be books. Ruby would often do the girls’ chores so they could focus on their homework. The parents continued to work multiple jobs, including Ruby as a maid, so Chisholm as the eldest took care of her siblings when her parents were not home. This included meeting them at PS 28 each day to take them home for lunch and then return them to school before Chisholm returned to PS 178. She walked them home again at the end of the school day.

In fall 1939 Chisholm began attending the Girls’ High School in the Bed-Stuy. Charles got a better job as a janitor for the school, so the family lived for free in a six-room apartment. While the neighborhood was predominantly Black, the school was diverse, with half the student body being Black. The school, located at 457 Nostrand Avenue between Macon and Halsey Streets, was built in 1885 as Brooklyn’s first high school and is considered a masterpiece of Victorian Gothic style. Until it opened, public-funded education ended with grammar school. It was opened to girls first, and a separate school for boys was constructed a few years later. The students, for their time, were progressive thinkers. For example, in 1942 they led a protest because the girls were not allowed to wear pants.

The school was both integrated and highly regarded for its education of girls. According to an 1895 article in the New York Times, It is the ambition of every Brooklyn girl after graduating from the public schools to enter the Girls’ High School, where she may enjoy the advantages of advanced education, and be prepared for college or for more immediate concerns of life. Courses included various foreign languages, zoology, the sciences, advanced mathematics, economics, ancient to modern history, and literary masterpieces, both American and English. ⁹ Parents from all over Brooklyn sent their daughters there. Chisholm did well and became vice president of the girls’ honor society, Junior Arista, at a time when few Black students were elected to student offices. She also became proficient in French. While she was sometimes teased for her West Indian accent, she ignored it.

Chisholm was a great student but still had a rebellious nature. She sometimes played jazz on the family piano and allowed a few boys to kiss her after walking her home from school, even though the girls were forbidden from dating. She also loved to dance, which was something her mother hated. While her father tried to convince his wife to allow their daughters to explore some parts of being American teenagers, Ruby was adamant about maintaining a strict Caribbean upbringing, replying, Charles, we’ve got to be strict on them if we want them to grow up to be something. ¹⁰

Chisholm graduated in 1942 with high marks, a testament to her parents’ attention to the children’s study habits and barring them from dating. After graduating high school, she was accepted to both Vassar in Poughkeepsie, New York, and Oberlin in Ohio, and she received several scholarship offers. However, her parents couldn’t afford the room and board, so she chose Brooklyn College, where New York students attended tuition-free and she could stay at home in the city, where the family then lived at 707 Kingsborough Walk.

Later in life she commented how Brooklyn College was the right choice: If I had gone to Vassar, the rest of my life might have been different. Would I have become one of the pseudo-White upper-middle-class Black women professionals, or a doctor’s wife with furs, limousines, clubs and airs? I can’t believe that would have happened, but one never knows. ¹¹ She described her mother being glad her daughter was going to college instead of pursuing a passing interest in becoming an actress, a profession her mother hated: My mother always thanked God that I had brains and got to college on scholarship. Had I not been able to go to college I would have gone to the devil in the theater, she thought. ¹²

Brooklyn College had just been established in 1930 by the Board of Higher Education of the City of New York and quickly gained a reputation for being academically challenging. Its administration was reluctant to admit women because they believed women to be mentally inferior to men and saw female college seekers as only interested in finding a husband. Thus, women who were admitted had to have a high school grade point average higher than what was required of male applicants. When Chisholm entered the school as a freshman, she was one of only sixty Black students out of the total student population of ten thousand. The college president and all members of the upper administration were White. The same was true of the student council, the college yearbook staff, and the newspaper staff. But Chisholm was undeterred; she had a responsibility to her family to do well.

Although she knew she wanted to teach, and it was the only professional field open to Black women, she majored in sociology, with a minor in Spanish. Her background in Spanish would later serve her well politically, given the diverse population of Brooklyn. Her sociology department was all White and all male. However, Brooklyn College brought her into contact with students from different backgrounds, and she was able to join clubs that exposed her to Black history. The campus was alive with World War II protests, in addition to academic and political clubs constantly holding events. This was a social and academic awakening for her, contrasting with how sheltered she had been by her protective parents.

Her college experience also revealed to her how racism was woven into the fabric of American culture. Guest lecturers invited by one her clubs, the Political Science Society, would make statements about Black people being limited or refer matter-of-factly to Black people’s supposedly innate vocation as laborers requiring the White population’s help. Chisholm noted how some Black people were expectedly subservient to White people, even if that White person was less intelligent or talented. She would always be upset about racism and how trivial skin color actually was. As she later put it, My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference. ¹³

These experiences of prejudice did not deter Chisholm from being active on campus. She was a member of the Pan American Student League, the Harriet Tubman Society, and the Social Service Club. The Harriet Tubman Society held discussions on Black leaders such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Frederick Douglass. Invited speakers included Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the first African American elected to Congress, and musician