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Alison Stewart: It is Women's History Month, and our choice for Full Bio this week reflects the groundbreaking career of Shirley Chisholm. We're discussing the book Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics by University of Kentucky Professor Anastasia Curwood [unintelligible 00:00:18] called the book, "A model political biography that all modern activists should read."

We've arrived at Shirley Chisholm getting to work in Washington and getting a lot of press attention as the first Black woman to be elected to Congress. She was there to represent Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Greenpoint, Bushwick, and Williamsburg. Imagine her surprise when she was assigned to the Agriculture Committee, which she very publicly decried. Here she is speaking at the National Democratic Club the day after the news hit the papers.

Shirley Chisholm: Many people have said, "What was so wrong with that, Mrs. Chisholm? On the Agriculture Committee, you have consumer problems, you have the lunch program, you have the food stamp program, you have all kinds of issues and problems that one finds in communities such as yours. What's wrong with working on the Agriculture Committee?" What is wrong with working on the Agriculture Committee was that I was not placed on one of those subcommittees that handles these problems. I was placed on a subcommittee of rural villages and forestry.

Alison Stewart: It would not be the only time she would face hostility, covert, and overt in the House of Representatives. Let's get into it with Anastasia Curwood.

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Alison Stewart: Let's talk about Congressperson Chisholm's first term. She unsurprisingly had trouble from southern white Congressmen. What was done to thwart her personally, and then what was an early sign that she would have professional hurdles?

Anastasia Curwood: Well, it's interesting. At first, when she got to Congress, she was dealing with a lot of racism and what some scholars call [unintelligible 00:02:23] The particular suspicion of Black women that Americans historically have and still do have. At first, she gets a southern congressman who can't believe that she makes the same salary he does. Here he is. He very likely employs, at poor wages, Black women in his own household, back in his district. Here's this woman. He's telling her that she-- he told Chisholm that she should be grateful and kiss the floor and kiss the chairs, and whatever she could, be so grateful that you're making this salary, the same one that I make.

She knew exactly what he was doing. She told him to just vanish and then she told him, "By the way, I'm paving the way for a lot more people who look like me to make the same money as you." She disarmed people with humor a good deal. Sometimes they didn't get her humor. The time that was really vivid for her that she talked about in her memoir and in several interviews was that she was accidentally sat at the Georgia delegations table in the congressional cafeteria, and an irate Georgia Congressman comes up to her and says, "This is our table." She said, "Oh, well, can I just sit here with you?" "Absolutely not." These are segregationists.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was five years old at that point, but these are people who were segregationists no matter what the law said. They refused to sit with her, and she said, "Fine. Go sit with somebody else and if anyone asks you why you're not sitting at your regular table, you tell them why." She thought that that would embarrass them, but it didn't. He told everybody who came in why he couldn't sit at his own table, because she's sitting there. Of course, they look over and there's a Black woman sitting there and so they knew exactly what he meant. He's not going to sit at the table with the Black woman. Those kinds of things were early on.

When she tried to find an apartment in Washington, D.C., she was turned away. This classic story of racism that many Black people have told, of you call and you don't sound Black, and you call and, "Yes, the apartment's available." You show up, and you're Black, and suddenly it's not available. That happened to her. Then somehow the agent found out that she was a congresswoman and suddenly it was available again. She said, "No thanks." As time went on, those kinds of overt expressions of racism lessened.

What she would say several times in the course of her career was that she experienced more obstacles in politics because of her sex than because of her race. The actual material or real impact on what she was trying to do was more affected by sexism than by racism. I'm pretty sure she's referring to some Black men colleagues who thought that she should be in her place. That I think was the case in terms of her presidential run especially. She felt a lot of sexism from Black people. White people, she expected racism than sexism. Black people, especially Black men, really made their sexism felt in terms of what she was trying to accomplish.

Alison Stewart: What did Shirley Chisholm believe she would accomplish by not being a quiet freshman? She decided that she was going to be someone who would be involved. What were the risks of not being quiet?

Anastasia Curwood: Well, the biggest risk, of course, is not being re-elected and being sent home in the next term. There are all sorts of hierarchies, were and are, all sorts of hierarchies inside the party caucus as well. One of the first things that she did, protesting her committee assignment, was seen by some of her colleagues as political suicide. [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: Just dive in here for a second. Explain her assignment.

Anastasia Curwood: Her first committee assignment by the Democratic Party leadership in Congress was Forestry and Agriculture Committee. What she said was, I had these one-liners, she said, "Apparently, all they knew about Brooklyn was that a tree grew there. Must be why I'm on that committee." Her point was that "Look, I have this particular expertise." She wanted to be on education and labor. "I should be on education and labor because I have been an early childhood educator. My legislative record in Albany was to fight for working people. This is a really logical use of my skills. Why am I on this committee for forestry and agriculture?" It just felt silly to her.

It felt like a waste of time. She protested it. She eventually got landed on veterans affairs, but the chair of forestry and agriculture was really mad that she was protesting being on his committee. As a freshman Congresswoman, if you want to put it that way, as she did, you're supposed to just go along and get along, and pay your dues, and respect your elders and the seniors in the House. She had very little reverence for them.

She thought that the House, in general, was pretty mediocre in terms of-- that she first got to the House and she saw that what's going on on the floor, people weren't really paying attention, members were just giving the first couple minutes of their speeches and then just dropping them in the hopper to be put in a congressional record. She just saw this lack of reverence and this mediocrity like, "Here I am, I'm a Black person in America. I've been raised to think that I have to put my best foot forward all the time and be impeccable in my credentials and my conduct. Look at these mediocre guys. Just glad-handing each other, shaking hands, visiting on the floor of the Congress. What we're trying to do here is really serious. Why should I go along with these silly rules?" She just didn't have the reverence that she was supposed to have, so she didn't.

Alison Stewart: She didn't. My guest is Anastasia Curwood. The name of the book is Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics. It's our choice for Full Bio. I want to take a little detour. She had this very loyal staff of women who worked for her. One woman, Carolyn Jones Smith is really interesting because Carolyn told her, "Shirley, we need to update your look. Your look is tired." Normally this would not really be that important, but to your point about a Black woman at this time who needs to be impeccable is going to be looked at at every moment, at every turn. How did that conversation come about? What was its impact? Did Shirley Chisholm understand why it was important?

Anastasia Curwood: Yes. She absolutely understood why it was important, that she was curating her look. She was always feminine. She was always a clothes horse. I've seen images of her at home before she went to Congress, and everything is just so, but it was a dated look. Carolyn Jones Smith, I've talked to her and if you've ever talked to Carolyn Jones Smith, you know exactly how the conversation went, because she's very blunt and just willing to tell people what the story is. The story that she told Chisholm was, "Why are you wearing these doodoo rolls in your hair?" She said that the way that Chisholm had used rollers to shape her hair made it look like she's wearing doodoo on her head.

Alison Stewart: Oh my goodness.

Anastasia Curwood: Yes. You need to do something about your hair. Caroline Smith went to a wig shop and picked up some wigs and brought them to the office and said, "Here, try these on." What she says is that Ms. Chisholm immediately started saying, "Oh, this is great. This is going to be great. I look so good." Those are the wigs that we're familiar with. That big globe, a hairdo that she had for her presidential campaign, not a hair out of place, that was a wig. It was up to date, it's iconic.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting actually.

Anastasia Curwood: Yes. It's absolutely iconic. The same thing with the clothes. Carolyn Smith found a shop that she liked to use, called The French Poodle, and had different outfits sent over, more up-to-date outfits, geometric patterns and pant suits or skirt suits or things like that. Shirley Chisholm would try them on and she started to look way, way more up-to-date. Then she became much more believable to young people as well, and young people became one of her really devoted constituencies. In Congress, she got invited to speak on a ton of college campuses. Then also during the presidential campaign when young people saw her as authentic.

Alison Stewart: The subtitle of your book is Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics. You write a lot in the book about how she applied Black feminism to her legislative priorities. For example, her first floor speech in the House of Representatives was about Vietnam. How did she apply Black feminism in her opposition to Vietnam?

Anastasia Curwood: First of all, she had a general sympathy to people with less power. She saw that the people of Vietnam, artificially divided, north and south, were not faring well in the war. She never saw the war as legitimate, but her argument that day was that we are spending gobs and gobs of money on this. We are not spending money on feeding, housing, and clothing Americans here at home. She thought it's just a profound misallocation of funds, a profound misordering of priorities. As a Black feminist, she thought that it was right and fair for the federal government to reallocate resources to the most vulnerable Americans.

That we as a nation have the responsibility to make sure that people are fed, clothed, and housed. She just thought that spending this money, while there were folks who had what we would now call food insecurity and housing insecurity, that that was just profoundly wrong. She said, "I'm not going to vote for any bill for military spending. I'm not going to vote yes until priorities are turned right side up again and we are supporting these programs of the federal government adequately to provide the basic needs for the people in the United States.

Alison Stewart: You note that she did not have the greatest attendance roll call rate, that her roll call rate was 55% in her first term, which was below the average democratic member attendance rate of 85%. Could you get at why, given how particular she was and how precise she was?

Anastasia Curwood: She was out talking, speaking, connecting with folks across the country. I discussed a little bit earlier about how young people started to really be attracted to her, especially after her speech against the war, peace groups began to bring her in to talk. A lot of student groups were included on college campuses. She became really in demand as a speaker and at public appearances. This tends to happen a lot of times with firsts and onlys, that sometimes people who are novel in a field have all these demands to go represent. Here she is, this first Black woman speaking out against the war. She's really new. She's really different, and so the public's demands on her were really, really high.

Alison Stewart: After the break, we'll hear about Shirley Chisholm's role in founding the Congressional Black Caucus and how she navigated second-wave white feminists. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: Welcome back to All Of It. I'm Allison Stewart. We're continuing our Full Bio conversation about Shirley Chisholm with professor and author Anastasia Curwood. Her book is called Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics. Now we arrive at the discussion of Chisholm and the feminist movement. One thing was clear, Chisholm thought women should run for office. Here she is at the National Democratic Club.

Shirley Chisholm: The hours come, ladies, and this is specifically to the ladies, when we shall no longer be the passive recipients of whatever the morals or the politics of a nation may decree, but that we shall rise up as women and play our role to the fullest.

Alison Stewart: Less clear was how to navigate the political agenda of White Second-Wave feminists. Chisholm practiced Black feminist power Politics, as Professor Curwood describes it, she saw most issues through that lens, but she was pragmatic and Chisholm would work with whomever she needed to, crossing party lines to achieve her goals and had no problem stepping over or around anyone who got in her way, Black, white, male or female. Let's get back to the conversation. By her second term, she finally got the committee assignment she so desired, education and labor. What impact did she hope she'd have on this committee?

Anastasia Curwood: Her big ambition was universal childcare. Even though she's sees that the Vietnam War has siphoned money away from domestic programs from the great society that Lyndon B. Johnson had inaugurated or hoped to inaugurate, she still thought that the capacity of the federal government to make a really positive impact on the lives of citizens was not truly being- utilized. Something that the federal government could do was adequately fund high-quality childcare centers to make sure that everyone who needed access to childcare could have it.

She made the point that this shouldn't just be for poor children, that actually she wanted a provision that anyone could get access to quality childcare. That this was not just a charity program or welfare in the sense of being designated and stigmatized as a program for poor people, that she really thought that everybody should have access to it. On education and labor, she introduced an amendment with her colleague Bella Abzug to institute universal childcare in the 1971 comprehensive Child Development Bill. That amendment actually made it through both houses of Congress.

She was on the conference committee that got a version of the bill reconciled, that had that universal childcare provision in it. It went to Richard Nixon's desk, but he vetoed it on the advice of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, devoted New Yorker, and also devoted breadwinner liberal, that is that men should have the economic power in the family. Also the propagator of the idea of the Black matriarch. In a testament to Chisholm's charm and an ability to find friendship where it possibly could be found--

She had a good bit in common with Moynihan in the sense that they're both liberals and so she would collaborate with him where needed. When she left Congress, he came to the going away party. I've seen pictures of them standing together smiling. The political conflict did not necessarily eclipse interpersonal friendships for Shirley Chisholm, and it's something that's hard for us to grasp today when things are so adversarial. She had some pretty improbable friends in Congress, including Moynihan.

Alison Stewart: Shirley Chisholm was one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus. What were some of the issues, what was important to the Congressional Black Caucus in its infancy?

Anastasia Curwood: Initially, they were trying to fight some of Nixon's most racist judicial appointments and actually get an audience with Richard Nixon. He stonewalled for over a year. Then they all wound up sitting in the State of the Union address and refusing to applause, sitting stone-faced. Actually, now I'm trying to remember, I think they boycotted it. They finally got an audience with Nixon. Chisholm said, "I'm hopeful." He said all the right things in the meeting, then of course, he didn't follow through.

Initially, the Congressional Black Caucus was really fighting back against Nixon, because they could get some things passed in Congress. It's a democratic majority Congress, but Nixon was in the way. Eventually, they started as a Democratic select committee in 1971, they had a big launch and became the Congressional Black Caucus. There was some hope that they would fill a leadership vacuum left by Martin Luther King Jr., that they could speak for Black Americans.

That didn't really come about. There were a few things that they agreed on, like budget priorities. Sometimes they'd present a budget together and fall in line. Chisholm was very practical. She would collaborate with the Congressional Black Caucus on these issues, didn't necessarily mean that she was happy with how they treated her, and especially when it came to her presidential run.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Anastasia Curwood, the name of the book is Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics. It's Our Choice for Full Bio. I wanted to talk about her Black feminist power politics and where it intersected with second-wave feminism. She made an interesting distinction between what white women feminists wanted and what Black women feminists needed. She said Black women were in it for the survival, for things like you mentioned, daycare and minimum wage. What were her challenges of navigating white feminism and Black feminism?

Anastasia Curwood: I'll sum it up this way. When she was present at the founding of the national organization of Black feminists or national Black Feminist Organization, rather, in 1978, she gets asked by a reporter from Off Our Backs, the feminist magazine, "Black women, you're creating your own organization, but have you ever really thought about what it is that white feminists really want and need?" She kept her patience. She said, "We have some things in common, but there are a lot of things that Black feminists understand, like economic precariousness, precarity and vulnerability, that the middle-class architects of what we call second-wave feminism, really just didn't get."

The thing is that you can be a feminist and you can be protesting the fact that women are not being admitted to the bar, or women are not being admitted to a literal bar, a men's only bar, or not having these particular careers or are stuck washing the kitchen floor while their husbands get to have the career. We are just trying to survive. We are trying to raise our children with enough resources to feed, house, clothe, and educate them. We don't have the same access as you do. Also, being a feminist didn't necessarily preclude someone from being racist.

There's some not just misunderstandings about what Black women were talking about in terms of their needs, but racism. Saying things, doing things, having expectations that denigrated Black women's capabilities and voice. It's important to remember that just because someone is on the side of the vulnerable in one arena doesn't mean they're on the side of the vulnerable in every arena. Shirley Chisholm really tried to take care and protect the vulnerable in every arena, no matter who people were, LGBTQ people, women, poor people, brown people, Spanish-speaking people, young people, all of those folks she saw as in need of protection and in need of increased power. It's a fundamental difference that not everybody shared in her feminist circles.

Alison Stewart: There are these iconic pictures of Shirley Chisholm along with Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, and Bella Abzug with a national organization of women, which she was vice president. You note that that was somewhat ceremonial. What would you want people to keep in mind the next time they look at one of those pictures?

Anastasia Curwood: Look at her face. Understand that it's a coalition, that she knows that she's not exactly aligned with everybody in that picture with her. She would make common cause. This is the whole point of Black feminist power politics. You take that expansive view of equality and building equality, and you try to exert power through coalitions. You get people together who are not the same as you, but who have a common interest, and you put pressure on existing power. That's how she conducted her politics. That was the goal. It's even the goal with the presidential campaign.

 

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