SHIRLEY CHISHOLM

A well-rounded portrait of the late politician, who, half a century ago, helped set the tone for contemporary Black and feminist politics.

The child of Black Caribbean immigrants—“her very person,” writes historian Curwood, “was at the intersection of race, gender, ethnic, and class identities”—Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005) decided early in life on a career in politics. She first attained influence in New York and then captured a formerly gerrymandered district in Brooklyn to enter the House of Representatives. There, she served for seven terms, where she defended issues of interest not just to her constituency, but also to an increasingly restive national community. She was prescient in many ways. Early on, writes the author, she worked to diversify the Democratic Party, pressing for a Black vice presidential candidate, a Native American secretary of the interior, and so forth—a vision realized only with the Biden administration half a century later. Chisholm fought what she considered the restrictiveness of terms such as women’s liberation and Black Power, which “created reactivity and a lack of critical thinking about how the movements could connect, especially through and among Black women”—again, a vision realized in the Black Lives Matter movement and with the rise of successors such as Stacey Abrams. Curwood deftly reveals Chisholm’s complexities and sometimes secretive nature as well as her tenacity in political struggles with Richard Nixon, who finally gave in to her campaign for raising the federal minimum wage in 1974; and Jimmy Carter, whom she faulted for calving off a separate Department of Education from the former Health, Education, and Welfare. As to welfare reform, Chisholm decried efforts to do away with federal aid to the needy even as she viewed welfare itself as “a symptom and direct cost of the corrosive effects of racism and sexism.” With the growth of reactionary conservatism in the Reagan years, Chisholm left institutional politics—but by no means political work.

A model political biography that all modern activists should read.