Shirley Chisholm In Her Own Words: Speeches and Writings is a timely collection of Chisholm’s musings on the need for hope, optimism, and valuable resources during times of great cultural, political, racial, sexual, and spiritual strife. It is essential reading for anyone interested in learning how democracy should work.
A representative for New York’s 12 congressional district (Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn) from 1969 to 1983, Chisholm was also the first Black woman elected to Congress. She attempted her own presidential run in 1972 and was the first woman to appear in a United States presidential debate. Fraser introduces her as a great orator, an intellectual, an accomplished rhetorician, a Black feminist, and a freedom fighter: “This book … allows Chisholm’s profound words to provide insights into America’s conservative policies, the all-pervasive sexism in politics and society, and the siege on Black and Brown people in the U.S. and around the globe.” Here we can study Chisholm’s boldness, decency, and acumen in her spoken and written commentaries concerning education, colonialization, criminal justice, civil rights, United States politics, and women’s rights — all hot-button topics at the time of her tenure that have carried over into our current state of affairs. She speaks and writes from the perspective of an empowered and outspoken representative of Black women and those who must find their voice in a country that severely and consistently marginalized them for hundreds of years, discouraging them “from participating in politics,” because of their race and gender.
As she stated in her 1984 speech “The Viability of Black Women in Politics,” the Black woman “suffers from a twin jeopardy: she has inherited a psychological and political disadvantage which has become a double-edged sword inflicted and sometimes self-inflicted on black women at every level of society. In short, black women are crushed by cultural restraints and abused by legitimate political power which has been, and continues to be, vested in leaders from the white male world.”
Chisholm neither gives Black women permission nor tries to coerce them to act, which would be counterintuitive to her principles. Instead, she says they have agency over their own choices and actions, and they cannot be complacent if they desire institutional change. In a 1974 lecture at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, she stated: “It is important that black women utilize their brainpower and focus on issues in any movement that will redound to the benefit of their people because we can serve as a vocal and a catalytic pressure group within the so-called humanistic movements, many of whom do not really comprehend the black man and black woman.”
However, Chisholm recognized systemic change was (and still is) impeded by white, patriarchal administrations, whether supposedly well intentioned or not. In an excerpt from her book Unbought and Unbossed, she regards the Johnson administration’s Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 as a stunning flop due to low income programs created by “white middle-class intellectuals who had no experience of being poor, despised, and discriminated against.” About the Nixon administration, a particular target of her dissatisfaction, she said she could not understand why Nixon could not hear what his own people told him they needed to live at a basic level. She was vexed by America’s placement of emphasis on Vietnam than on its own poverty stricken communities: “What was happening? How could a President be so unconcerned about the needs of the nation he headed, so unresponsive to the will of its citizens? What barrier kept the voices of the people from reaching him?”
Master rhetoricians ask questions before they provide answers, and expose their uncertainties rather than flaunt their understanding. Chisholm was no different. Because she had experienced oppression first hand, she knew that the source of maltreatment is related to an insatiable need for power on the part of the abuser, and it was those experiences that made her an effective representative for her entire constituency. Through her masterful use of logos, ethos, and pathos, Chisholm’s arguments and messages were persuasive and showed the depth of her empathy.
Despite her talent for expression, she was not naive about what it takes to enact change. She put it directly: “What I am interested in is what they do.” Zinga A. Fraser’s edited collection makes it clear that Chisholm, along with her writings and speeches, acted to ensure that America’s systems were functioning. Although the primary focus in this anthology is Black women, whether it be in schools, politics, prisons, the housing market, hospitals, religious institutions, or communities, these spoken and written works tell us to release ourselves from the literal and figurative shackles that control us and have institutionalized our minds and souls for too long.
Fraser’s final excerpts communicate how Chisholm believed America’s youth should be involved at the forefront of this movement: “There must be a new coalition of all Americans — black, white, red, yellow and brown, rich and poor — who are no longer willing to allow their rights as human beings to be infringed upon by anyone else, for any reasons.” In other words, Shirley Chisholm saw the American people as more principled than the more sordid aspects of its history. Even so, she told everyone one of us to beware of the allurements of power and to push back against repressive institutions that continue to perpetuate injustice in our society.
[Published on October 8, 2024 by the University of California Press, 304 pages, $24.95 hardcover]