#ShePersisted:
Shirley Chisholm
Inspired by Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed –
about the first black woman US presidential candidate,
Shirley Chisholm – gal-dem discuss the echoes of politics then and now, intersectionality and a generation hungry for more stories like Shirley's
Ahead of our Nevertheless She Persisted film season, guest editor Claire Marie Healy has invited three agenda-setting zines to weigh in on the docs. In our final edition of the series, Charlie Brinkhurst Cuff and her gal-dem editors discuss Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed.
The first black woman US presidential candidate, Shirley Chisholm blasts onto screen in the 2004 documentary part-named after her political slogan, ‘Unbought and Unbossed’.
‘I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud,’ she announces. ‘I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and I am equally proud of that.’
A slim, prim woman who vibrates quiet power under a curly tousle of black hair, she is quickly shown to be eminently capable, likeable and politically ‘woke’ with reams of grassroots support. The documentary immediately leaves you with the question – why is it that so many people have never heard of this groundbreaking politician before?
What Chisholm ‘72 manages to capture from its opening is the endearing spirit of a woman who, in her absence from current political discourse, seems to have been mistreated by history. This is how the world should have seen Chisholm at the time, from her beginnings as a member of the New York State Assembly, to her election as the first black woman to Congress in 1968 – a post she held until 1982 – through to her campaign in 1972: as an inspirational leader to platform, not someone to be sidelined thanks to her black womanhood.
‘I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud.
I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and I am equally proud of that.’
Working in an overtly racist time (one of her fellow Democratic candidates was pro-segregation), Chisholm faced at worst, attacks on her life, and at best a lack of support from the handful of other black male politicians on the scene and the women’s movement. Despite all this, her focus on the connections between race, class, and gender in her policies speak to the current moment more than many politicians manage now – and all this, over a decade before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality.
Ultimately, Chisholm knew that she couldn’t win, but that wasn’t the core reason why she ran for the Democratic nomination against 12 other white male candidates.
As written in Broadly editor Zing Tsjeng’s new book, Forgotten Women, ‘Shirley’s presidential campaign was a symbol of what had yet to be achieved – or, to put it simply, she ran because she knew someone had to do it first’.
In the documentary, Chisholm comments on whether or not black voters will have the ‘political sophistication’ to gather the idea that she was paving the road for future generations. It’s heartbreaking that she did not get to witness either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton’s successful campaigns. She passed away in 2005.
Over the years her recognition has come slowly. Chisholm was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour, by Obama himself in 2015. And just last week congresswoman Yvette Clarke paid tribute to Chisholm as she declared 2018 the ‘Year of the Black Woman’; Clarke represents the same district now.
That said, filmmaker Shola Lynch has explained that the Peabody Award-winning documentary was ‘very hard to sell’ at the time it was made, as the industry didn’t understand who its audience might be. As part of gal-dem, a collective of young women and non-binary people of colour whose politics correlates with Chisholm’s, I know who it was for; people like us.
In response to the documentary, Leyla, art director at gal-dem; Niellah, the lifestyle editor at gal-dem and our friend Zing Tsjeng, the editor of Broadly UK and now-author of the Forgotten Women series, which looks at the rebel leaders who have been left out of the history books – including Shirley.
Charlie: So what were your initial thoughts on 'Chisholm ‘72'?
Leyla: I thought it was so inspirational, and that all the themes seemed super relevant to 2018. Everything she was talking about was concurrent to the things that we’re having to deal with today. (Like) her talking about how some feminist movements don’t cater to all kinds of women. Or the black movement – she was out there recognising that it wasn’t super friendly to women. I was like, ‘Wow’. In 1972!
Niellah: It left me feeling quite frustrated because I’d never heard of her before, and she obviously tried so hard to do what she did and kept facing problem after problem. I thought she had an amazing attitude towards doing something that was basically impossible. Something that everyone said couldn’t be done.
Leyla: I related it to that presidential text by Zoe Leonard, ‘I want a dyke for president’. Because it sort of grew out of the same heartstrings. You want a relatable person, someone who’s out there for everyone instead of the same representation again and again.
Charlie: I really liked her aura. Do you know what I mean? She seemed kind .
Niellah: But also quite stern and didn’t take any shit, really. She knew everything was against her.
'There’s a new, younger audience who are hungry to look for stories like Shirley’s...'
Charlie: Watching the 2004 documentary now, with everything going on in 2018, did it feel relevant?
Zing: I think in some ways, society has been the one to catch up to the documentary and to Shirley Chisholm in general. You look at some of the campaign promises that she ran on and you look at some of the things she did as a congresswoman. This is a woman whose politics jive very neatly with the politics of today and of young people. So I think in many ways the documentary has always been relevant. Now there’s just a new, younger audience who are hungry to look for stories like Shirley’s. I’m very glad that this documentary is getting a second airing, especially in this day and age.
Niellah: It looks like it was filmed in 2004, but yeah, I think the content is very relevant and relatable. And I liked the fact that they go back from the 70s to modern day, slipping through time and speaking to her in the 21st century. It was nice to see her speak about it more recently.
Charlie: I realised it was actually released a year before she died, in 2005.
Niellah: Oh she died! Peak! I thought she was still alive. She died way before Obama, though. I wish she’d known what she’d done.
Charlie: The difference with Obama was that he was the most acceptable black face at the right time.
Niellah: He’s a man. He’s biracial. The acceptable face of a black politician.
Zing: I think that in many ways the fact that she was a very progressive black woman in the Democratic party was frightening and new to a lot of people. Her identity kind of existed at the intersection of all these things and the fact she was running for power? A lot of people couldn’t handle it. Where she could have been expecting to find allies, whether that was within the black caucus or the women’s rights movement, she was met with a lot of entrenched resistance. These movements had never before considered intersectionality – where someone who looked like Shirley, who came from a background like Shirley, could speak to their people.
'Where she could have been expecting to find allies… she was met with a lot of entrenched resistance...'
Leyla: It’s a case of discourse being super important. Kimberlé Crenshaw only came up with the word intersectionality in 1989. Back then, it wasn’t put into words and it wasn’t in the national discourse. So people continuously had to state, ‘I am a black woman’ to get people to recognise their different oppressions. And a lot of white feminists are like, ‘Oh it’s so academic’, but actually in ‘72, before anyone even coined the term, Shirley was saying the same thing! We just put a word on it. We needed it beforehand.
Charlie: Words are developed through necessity and it definitely felt like she was paving the way. But it was super interesting to me, the fact that the black caucus didn’t get behind her.
Niellah: Again, it was very male-dominated at the time. There were only a few women in the Black Panther Party, and most of those women looked a certain way. They were attractive, they were light-skinned, they weren’t her. It was quite sad and disheartening that they were like, ‘Oh, there’s no point backing her, just because it’s a wasted vote’.
Charlie: I did love the little clips of her supporters being like, ‘We don’t need to think about another candidate, we’ve got Shirley!’ – with big smiles on their faces.
Niellah: I thought those parts were lovely. She knew she wasn’t going to win but that’s not why she was doing it. She was doing it to open the door for others. I think that’s quite beautiful, going through all that, knowing that it won’t lead to you winning, but it would lead to someone like Obama winning.
Zing: In many ways she knocked down those black ceilings for other people. She didn’t succeed for her own personal benefit, she succeeded for the benefit of someone like Obama, of someone like Hillary. Who became the first black president: who became the first female presidential candidate. I think there’s something really powerful to draw from her run, which is that you might not think you’ve succeeded, but it’s probably knocked down the doors for a lot of people after you. And in many ways that’s a much more gratifying thing, I think.
'She knew she wasn’t going to win but that’s not why she was doing it.
She was doing it to open the door for others...'
Charlie: How does she come across for you – do you think she came across as being scared at all?
Niellah: No. Even when you see her later on in life she didn’t seem scared. She wanted to be known for her merit. Of course she was a black woman but she also wanted to be known as a politician. I really liked how she came across, no nonsense.
Leyla: (She’s) confident. I really liked when she was talking to the schoolchildren and said, ‘I’m doing this for future generations’. It was a complete refusal from her to adopt this diminutive, subservient, apologetic manner. Often women feel like they have to apologise.
Charlie: This is something so small, but you know how she’s got a tiny speech impediment, a tiny lisp? I really liked that.
Niellah: Yeah, it just made her, I dunno, a bit more human!
Charlie: It’s partially to do with the times – because the other candidate, the one who was in favour of segregation, faced an assassination attempt in the run up to the election which put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life – but she also almost got killed on the campaign. The man with the 10-inch knife who tried to stab her...
Niellah: Yeah, the attacks. Three times! That was really shocking. The person with the knife, I thought that was horrific. That her life was in danger just for speaking out and wanting to be a politician. That she literally put her life at risk to pave the way for other women, other black women.
Charlie: Do you think if another black woman ever tries to run for president she would be under the same amount of scrutiny?
Niellah: I think the exact same thing would happen. Maybe minus three attacks on her life. Although loads of the black politicians didn’t want to back her; I feel like that would be a bit different now. But as far as the women’s movement, I think it would be exactly the same. The idea that she could be forgotten says a lot about the women’s movement because I’m sure that Hillary Clinton is going to go down in every feminist history book ever. And she wasn’t the first!
Charlie: You could almost understand if she’d fallen out of the national consciousness having not really achieved anything other than not winning Democratic nomination, but she was the first black woman to join the American Congress, and was there from the sixties through to the 80s.
Zing: What I find quite astonishing is until quite recently, around the time of the Hillary campaign, people were like, ‘Oh no, wait, Hillary’s not the first woman to run for Democratic nominee’. I find that really quite surprising but at the same time probably not, because there were a lot of reasons why fate conspired to make someone like Shirley forgotten. She was not the eventual winner of the candidacy and I think that was maybe one thing that contributes to her being forgotten.
Niellah: But she’s the first in so many things. Black women are erased so easily from history. It’s just really sad you don’t hear about her. You’d think you’d hear about the first ever woman to run for president. Especially with Hillary and Obama.
Zing: Originally the cover of my new book, which features Shirley on the cover, was going to have a picture of a woman with her face quite literally erased, as in you could see the rubber marks across her face and you wouldn’t be able to see her face at all. We then changed that because I didn’t want it to imply that these women were forgotten permanently or that we were in any way erasing them, which is why the current cover shows her with a post-it note covering her face, but the inside cover image is the post-it note scrunched up and a full-bleed image of Shirley.
'We’re using our voice to elevate the voices of others that aren’t heard'
Charlie: At gal dem, a lot of the work we are doing is political, but do you consider us political activists? What do you think Shirley's legacy could be to the work we’re doing now?
Niellah: Yes. Especially as women of colour, non-binary people of colour just putting out our voices and supporting things like Yarl's Wood – that’s activism. We’re using our voice to elevate the voices of others that aren’t heard. But you don’t know where you’re going, unless you see where you’ve come from. I think it’s really important to look through history at people like Shirley.
Charlie: How do you think that we could continue to recognise Shirley and keep her in the national consciousness?
Leyla: She would be a useful figure to learn about for anyone who’s marginalised. Because what she’s talking about is having a marginalised identity. That’s what she says at the start. Anyone can identify with her struggles. We could lobby education departments but also keep circulating this stuff in the media, through gal-dem.
Charlie: Chat about her to our future daughters.
Leyla: The daughters of the revolution!
Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed
Dir: Shola Lynch
US (2004)
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Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed (12A*) is screening on Wednesday 18 April in Barbican Cinema 2
Nevertheless She Persisted: Suffrage, cinema and beyond is screening from 18–24 April in the Barbican Cinema
Illustrations by Alexandra Bowman.
Part of The Art of Change, our 2018 season exploring how the arts respond to, reflect and potentially effect change in the social and political landscape.
About the panellists
Hosted by Charlie Brinkhurst Cuff, deputy editor at gal-dem
Leyla Reynolds is the art director at gal-dem
Niellah is the lifestyle editor at gal-dem
Zing Tsjeng is the editor of Broadly UK and her book, Forgotten Women, is out now with Octopus.
gal-dem is a magazine online and in print exclusively written by women of colour and non-binary people of colour. Its last print edition is available here, and the next issue will be forthcoming in September 2018.
Claire Marie Healy is Deputy Editor at Dazed and a culture writer and can be found at @clairehly
