Unbought, Unbossed, Unfinished: Shirley Chisholm and the Road to Hakeem Jeffries

Builders of Multiracial Democracy · Part 2 of 5

On January 25, 1972, Shirley Chisholm stood in the pulpit of Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn and announced that she would seek the Democratic nomination for president. "I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud," she said. "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." She was, she said, "the candidate of the people." Fifty-four years later, as returns from the 2026 midterms are counted, another Brooklyn Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries, leads his party in the House of Representatives. The road between them runs through the same neighborhoods, the same churches and the same argument about who American democracy is for.

A Teacher from Bedford-Stuyvesant

Chisholm was born Shirley St. Hill in Brooklyn on November 30, 1924, the daughter of immigrants from Barbados and British Guiana. Her father, Charles St. Hill, and her mother, Ruby Seale St. Hill, were followers of Marcus Garvey, and the Garvey movement's insistence on Black pride, self-reliance and speaking without apology ran through the household. Chisholm recalled her parents' Garveyism in Shola Lynch's documentary Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed, and the lesson stayed with her: no one else would define her place. She spent part of her childhood with her grandmother in Barbados, where, she later said, she absorbed a strict schooling and a habit of speaking her mind. She graduated from Brooklyn College in 1946, earned a master's degree in early childhood education at Columbia University and ran day-care centers before she ran for anything.

Her politics began in the clubhouses of Bedford-Stuyvesant, where white-led Democratic organizations still controlled nominations in neighborhoods that had become largely Black and Puerto Rican. Chisholm joined insurgent groups that challenged them. In 1964 she won a seat in the New York State Assembly, where she pressed for unemployment insurance for domestic workers and helped create SEEK, the program that opened the City University of New York to students from poor neighborhoods.

"Unbought and Unbossed," 1968

In 1968, a court-ordered redistricting created a new Twelfth Congressional District centered on Bedford-Stuyvesant. Chisholm ran under the slogan "Unbought and Unbossed," won the Democratic primary over the party's favored candidate and then defeated James Farmer, the former national director of the Congress of Racial Equality, who ran on the Liberal and Republican lines. In January 1969 she became the first Black woman to serve in Congress.

She refused to be quiet once she got there. Assigned to the Agriculture Committee's subcommittee on forestry, she protested that there were few trees in Brooklyn and won a transfer to Veterans' Affairs, and later to Education and Labor, where her constituents' needs actually lived. In 1971 she joined twelve colleagues in founding the Congressional Black Caucus. She fought for an expanded food stamp program, helped build the case for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC, and in 1974 helped extend federal minimum-wage protection to domestic workers.

A Campaign Built to Bargain

Chisholm's independence was also visible in where she chose not to go. In March 1972, some eight thousand activists and officials gathered in Gary, Indiana, for the National Black Political Convention, the high-water mark of the era's push for a unified Black political agenda. Chisholm, the only Black candidate then running for president, did not attend. The convention's leaders, overwhelmingly men, declined to endorse her, and she refused to submit her campaign to a gathering that treated a Black woman's candidacy as a bargaining chip rather than a serious bid. Her absence from Gary said what her slogan said: she answered neither to the white party bosses nor to a Black political establishment that expected her to wait her turn.

The 1972 campaign is often remembered as a gesture. Chisholm meant it as leverage. Her strategy was to gather enough delegates to bargain at a deadlocked convention for policies on child care, jobs, hunger and the poor. She campaigned on college campuses and in Black churches, among Puerto Rican, Mexican American and Native American voters, and among feminists who had never seen one of their own on a national ticket.

She fought on two fronts. Many Black male officials, including some of her caucus colleagues, declined to endorse her, preferring to bargain for George McGovern or to wait for a man. Many white feminist leaders praised her but put their weight behind candidates they thought could win. She was underfunded, kept off ballots and forced to go to court to win a place in a televised debate. She won no primaries, but she brought about 152 delegate votes to the convention floor in Miami Beach. When George Wallace was shot in May 1972, she visited him in the hospital, a decision that cost her support but that she defended as plain humanity. Years later, Wallace, by then seeking Black votes, helped her pass legislation extending the minimum wage.

She was clear about what the campaign was for. "I ran because somebody had to do it first," she wrote in The Good Fight. "The next time a woman runs, or a black, a Jew or anyone from a group that the country is 'not ready' to elect to its highest office, I believe that he or she will be taken seriously from the start." She meant her run to open the door for women, Black Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and every group told to wait, and she wanted history to remember her, in her words, as "a catalyst for change."

The Brooklyn Bench

Chisholm stood in a long line of Black women who built political power from the ground up, from Ida B. Wells and Mary McLeod Bethune to Fannie Lou Hamer, whose Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party challenged the 1964 convention, and the women of the Black Panther Party who ran its community programs. Her run also opened the path that later Black women would travel, from Barbara Jordan and Carol Moseley Braun to Kamala Harris, and to the organizers and PACs recruiting Black women for every office today.

Chisholm left Congress in 1983. Her successor, Major Owens, a former librarian and community organizer, held the seat for twenty-four years. Around them grew a Central Brooklyn political tradition of Black, Caribbean and working-class organizing that produced state legislators, city council members and congressional members, among them Edolphus Towns, Yvette Clarke and Hakeem Jeffries.

Jeffries, the son of a social worker and a substance-abuse counselor, grew up in Crown Heights and attended Cornerstone Baptist Church. He served three terms in the State Assembly, beginning in 2007, before winning a House seat in 2012. In January 2023 he became leader of the House Democrats, the first African American to lead a party caucus in either chamber of Congress. His district, the Eighth, covers neighborhoods that Chisholm once represented, among them parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

Two Styles, One Question

Jeffries is not Chisholm. She was an insurgent who prized her independence over the approval of party leaders; he is an institutionalist whose power rests on holding a diverse caucus together. Progressives have criticized him for the very caution that Chisholm rejected. But the comparison shows how Black political power has grown. Chisholm had to fight her own party simply to be heard. Jeffries speaks for it.

What links them is the question Chisholm put at the center of her campaign: whether a multiracial democracy will serve the people it has most often left out. She called herself the candidate of "the people," and she meant those whose votes had been diluted, ignored or taken for granted. That question has not changed. After Louisiana v. Callais in April 2026 narrowed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and after legislatures across the South redrew maps that endangered a third of the Congressional Black Caucus, Black representation in Congress is once again a fight, not a given.

What Chisholm Left Brooklyn

Chisholm died on January 1, 2005. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2015. She once said that she wanted to be remembered not as the first Black woman in Congress but as "a Black woman who lived in the 20th century and who dared to be herself." Her daring built more than a career. It built a lane in Brooklyn politics that others could travel, and a standard against which they can be measured.

Builders of Multiracial Democracy

This piece is part 2 of five in the HistorianSpeaks series Builders of Multiracial Democracy, tracing how Black leaders built the coalition at the center of American democracy:

1. Cultivating Democracy: Jesse Jackson and the Multiracial Bench 2. Unbought, Unbossed, Unfinished: Shirley Chisholm and the Road to Hakeem Jeffries (you are here) 3. “My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole”: Barbara Jordan, Gus Adair and Texas 4. The Chicago Blueprint: Harold Washington, Jesse Jackson and Carol Moseley Braun 5. Alexis Herman Opened the Doors of Labor

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