INTERVIEW BY SUSAN BROWNMILLER
THE NEW YORK TIMES
APRIL 13, 1969
The annual founders’-day luncheon of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority was held this January at the Americana Hotel. The occasion represented a triple honor for the Brooklyn alumnae chapter of Delta, one of three ranking and fiercely competitive Negro sororities in the country. It was Brooklyn’s turn to play hostess to the national; the guest speaker was the Honorable Shirley Chisholm, first black Congresswoman in America; and, coup of coups, in the secret ceremony before the luncheon the chapter was privileged to initiate into Delta the lady of the hour herself.
“Soror” Chisholm cut an imposing figure on the dais. Small, dark, ramrod straight, she was outfitted in a blue-and-gilt brocade suit with matching turban. Her black-rimmed eyeglasses were firmly planted above her wide nose. Her bearing gave her the look of a visiting queen rather than Delta’s newest initiate. When it was her turn to speak, Mrs. Chisholm arose with her prepared text.
She has a quality that is rare in any woman—the ability to speak forcefully before an audience. On this particular afternoon, the former schoolteacher began by enunciating each syllable with biting clarity, her West Indian accent rising and falling in controlled cadence, her strongly sibilant “s” forming a pleasant rhythmic counterpoint to the clipped words. Midway through her effort (an inspirational plea for higher horizons), Mrs. Chisholm smiled broadly. As she put aside her notes, her voice lost some of its didactic schoolmarm flavor and took on an earthier cadence of the streets.
“You have no idea what those people in Washington with their hands on the power have been plotting and planning for us. Let me tell you. Do not be complacent. The Man says he knows we ain’t never gonna come together.” The audience rumbled its understanding of her warning. Surveying the ballroom from left to right, Mrs. Chisholm went on. “Oh, everyone is being so kind to me. They have such good advice. They tell me, Shirley, you’re just a freshman and you have to keep quiet as a freshman—.” She paused for effect as some of the women giggled.
“I listen sweetly to them and then I say, ‘Gentlemen, thank you for your advice. I understand what you’re saying. But when I get up there on the floor of Congress, I’m sure you’ll understand that I am speaking with the pent-up emotions of the community.’ ” She grinned. “One thing the people in Washington and New York are afraid of in Shirley Chilsholm is HER MOUTH.” The audience roared.
A few days later, Representative Chisholm returned to Washington and began her fight to change her assignment from a House Agriculture subcommittee on Forestry and Rural Villages to something more relevant to her Bedford-Stuyvesant community. (Mrs. Chisholm had hoped for Education and Labor.) She approached Speaker John McCormack, who told her, she reports, to accept the assignment and “be a good soldier.” She brooded about that for a while, she says, and then decided, “That’s why the country is the way it is.” Mrs. Chisholm then placed an amendment before the House Democratic caucus to remove her name from the Agriculture Committee, aware that she was taking an unprecedented step—bucking the powerful Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and the man who parcels out committee assignments to his fellow Democrats. According to Mrs. Chisholm, Mills tried to call her bluff in caucus. “Will the gentlewoman from Brooklyn withdraw her amendment?” he intoned. Mrs. Chisholm says she was particularly tickled by “gentlewoman,” but otherwise remained unmoved. Mrs. Chisholm was removed from Agriculture and later assigned to Veterans’ Affairs. The Chisholm balk remains the most vivid sign of life in the Ninety-First Congress.
Shirley Chisholm is true grit. Her comet-like rise from clubhouse worker to Representative in the United States Congress was no accident of the political heavens. It was accomplished by the wiles of a steely politician with a belief in her own abilities which at times approaches an almost Messianic fervor. “My rise has been constantly fighting,” she likes to say. “And I have had to fight doubly hard because I am a woman. I am a very different sort of person than usually emerges on the political scene.” It’s an accurate self-assessment. “The nation’s first black Congresswoman”—or “first black woman Congressman,” as she prefers to put it—does not begin to explain who Shirley Chisholm is. But “the first black,” etc., is not how she wishes to be remembered. “I’d like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts. That’s how I’d like to be remembered.”
There is a saying about women who hold elective office—that most of them got there on a “widow’s mandate.” It certainly holds true for Edna Kelly, the Congressional veteran who was unceremoniously bumped from her seat last year when Brooklyn’s Twelfth Congressional District was redrawn to carve out a largely black constituency. Mrs. Kelly was brought into politics by Irwin Steingut, then the minority leader of the State Assembly, when her husband, a judge, was killed in an automobile crash. Her nineteen-year record in Congress was, at best, mediocre. Early in 1968, the State Legislature, under Federal Court order to correct population inequities in some Congressional districts, revamped the lines in central Brooklyn in such a manner that Mrs. Kelly was wiped off the political map. Mrs. Kelly, until that time a loyal soldier in the Brooklyn Democratic organization, cried “betrayal.” She charged that county leader Stanley Steingut, the son of her first patron, had willfully forced her political extinction. She eventually delivered her own coup de grâce by running a hopeless primary race in a neighboring district against Emanuel Celler.
The new Twelfth Congressional District was anchored to the heavily black Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood (Mrs. Chisholm’s home territory), with slices of Crown Heights, Bushwick and Williamsburg around the edges. The new district was about 80 percent Democratic. Its ethnic breakdown was 70 percent black and 30 percent white. There were Puerto Ricans in Williamsburg (Mrs. Chisholm speaks Spanish fluently), Italians in the Bushwick section, and Jews in Crown Heights. Mrs. Chisholm’s survey of the election rolls (“Before I make a move, I analyze everything,” she says, eyes snapping) turned up one additional demographic factor which possibly eluded other Congressional hopefuls. The Twelfth had ten thousand to thirteen thousand more registered women voters than men. Before the ink was dry on the new district’s lines, Shirley Chisholm put in her bid.
While Bedford-Stuyvesant was the heart of the new Twelfth Congressional District, the Unity Democratic Club, the regular Democratic organization for the Fifty-Fifth State Assembly District, was the strongest political club in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Unity was founded in 1960 around the person of Thomas R. Jones, a politically active lawyer, and the club won its spurs in 1962 with the election of Jones to State Assembly and to the district leadership, beating out Sam Berman’s old-line Jewish organization in the changing neighborhood. Tom Jones was Unity’s standard-bearer and guiding light, but when he was offered a civil court judgeship in 1964, he accepted—and removed himself from the local political fray. It was at this point that Shirley Chisholm announced she would seek Jones’s assembly seat.
“They were shocked,” Mrs. Chisholm remembers. “It was the first time a black woman had sought elective office in Brooklyn. But I knew I could do it. I felt strong enough. There were people in that clubhouse who were saying, ‘Why not give Chisholm a chance? She’s got it. She can lead.’ So I told the club’s executive committee, ‘If you need to have a discussion, have a discussion. But it makes no difference to me. I intend to fight.’ ” Other who were members of the executive committee at the time remember it differently. Particularly, they recall a stormy session with tears when it looked for a moment as if Jones might stay in the Assembly after all. In any event, Mrs. Chisholm got the Unity Club’s endorsement and went on to win the 1964 primary and the general election. Because of the reapportionment, she had to run again in 1965 and ’66. “I proved to be the top vote-getter,” she says grimly. “I always pulled higher than the top of the ticket.”
In Albany, Mrs. Chisholm also proved an able enough legislator. Her name was attached to the Assembly side of the first legislation extending unemployment insurance benefits to domestic workers, and she plumped hard in committee and on the Assembly floor for the SEEK program, a higher-education plan that enables worthy disadvantaged students who make low-aptitude scores to enter universities and receive intensive remedial aid. Assemblyman Albert H. Blumenthal, the newly appointed “deputy” minority leader, recalls Mrs. Chisholm as “a very tough lady, likable, but a loner. Unlike other women in the Legislature, she was never afraid to jump into a debate. Shirley was never hysterical, she never flailed. She knew what she wanted to say and she said it well. She wasn’t quick to make up her mind, but when she did, you couldn’t blast her out of it. Enemies like Shirley,” Blumenthal adds half-humorously, “nobody needs in politics.” (For those who like to keep their records straight, Mrs. Chisholm was the second Black woman to sit in the Assembly. The first was Bessie Buchanan, the coquettish wife of a Harlem businessman, whose major legislative effort over the years was devoted to getting a certain song officially declared the New York State anthem.)
Albany is a dreary place for legislators once the day’s session is over, and most of “the boys” make the best of it by breaking up into congenial groups at night to make the rounds of restaurants, movies and bars. “My impression of Shirley,” Blumenthal says, “is that she preferred to take her work back to the hotel with her at night.” Blumenthal is not an insensitive fellow. He admitted he couldn’t recall anyone in his crowd ever extending a dinner invitation to the legislator from Brooklyn, but he didn’t know precisely why.
“I don’t blame the fellows for not asking me out to dinner,” Mrs. Chisholm says reflectively. “I think there was a little fear of ‘How do we handle her socially?’ Men don’t like independent women. Not many knew I was a regular gal. I think they were afraid to take the chance. I ate most of the time in my room. I had the TV and I read and I did my legislative homework. I went to bed early.” Stiffening, she concludes, “I do not care for the night life of the New York State Legislature.”
One thing that was noticeable about Assemblywoman Chisholm was that her relations with Brooklyn leader Stanley Steingut appeared to be considerably strained. Blumenthal believes it all began over what Chisholm concluded was a personal slight she had once received from the brusque former county chairman. The inscrutable, tight-lipped Steingut professes to be “honestly baffled” by Chisholm’s actions. Chisholm says, “Those that know Stanley and those that know me know the story.” At any rate, many of Chisholm’s votes, both in the Assembly and in Democratic party councils, were not designed to make Mrs. Steingut happy. Even as recently as this past fall, when she was out of the Assembly, she let it be known that she personally preferred Moe Weinstein of Queens to Steingut for the Assembly’s minority leadership.
Stanley Steingut is not the only man who professes to be baffled by Chisholm. Her relations with black politicians in Brooklyn have often been bumpy. One man who is an expert on Shirley Chisholm—her husband, Conrad—offers this explanation: “Mrs. Chisholm competes very well with everybody.”
Conrad Chisholm is a pipe-smoking, outwardly affable, solidly built man who is unquestionably devoted to his wife’s career. The two are very close (their nineteen-year marriage has been childless) and it amuses Mrs. Chisholm that those who don’t know her husband are quick to pigeonhole him. “They always assume that my husband must be a tiny little shrimp of a weakling,” she says with a grin.
Mr. Chisholm is also amused by outsiders’ assumptions about his marriage. “I am not threatened by her in any way,” he says firmly. “I grew up secure. I’m West Indian. Early in our marriage I saw Shirley’s ability to get things done. I decided she’d be the star in our family, she’d get the billing. I push her in any way I can.” Chisholm is a former private investigator who specialized in knocking holes in compensation claims against the railroads, and when the mood strikes him, he can spin intricate tales of the ruses he employed to trap less than honest claimants. He is now a senior investigator with New York City’s Department of Social Service, in charge of evaluating Medicaid applications. Taking a passing interest in politics himself, he has been an election district captain in the Unity Club.
Although Mrs. Chisholm was the first in her district to announce for Congress in 1968, she didn’t have the field to herself for very long. Judge Tom Jones—who had opted for the bench four years before—indicated that he was interested. Conrad Chisholm says that well before the petition period began, a “Jones for Congress” storefront “sprang up” on Fulton Street, although Jones disclaimed he had encouraged it. Thomas R. Fortune, the man who replaced Jones as Unity Club leader (and the man who this year replaced Mrs. Chisholm in Albany), gets a funny look on his face when Jones’s Congressional interest in mentioned. “He came around to the club,” Fortune admits, “but there wasn’t much support for him. You know, a judge is supposed to be above politics, and Jones hadn’t been to the club much in the last few years.”
Jones was known as Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s man in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Kennedy had put his prestige behind a Bedford-Stuyvesant redevelopment project, and he had named Jones to direct the “community” end of the program. Jones was the man that Kennedy talked to in Bedford-Stuyvesant; Kennedy did not take any notice of Shirley Chisholm. “Kennedy didn’t understand the district,” Mrs. Chisholm says, her eyes narrowing. “I was the top vote-getter, but Kennedy never sought me out.” Her eyes narrow more as she adds, “I think there were some people who kept him from me.”
Mrs. Chisholm was convinced that Jones had won support from Robert Kennedy for his Congressional bid. Jones is convincing when he admits—with considerable chagrin—the he went to Kennedy for his help, but that Kennedy told him he would be “more valuable” as head of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. Jones eventually declined to make the race; he accepted instead a nomination for a State Supreme Court judgeship.
State Senator William C. Thompson, who had also declared early, was somewhat ambivalent at first, according to the Chisholms. Right up to the deadline for filing nominating petitions, they say, Thompson had assured Shirley that he wasn’t going to run. They point to his final decision to make the race as proof that he had a tacit understanding with Robert Kennedy—and Stanley Steingut—two men who had considerable clout with the white district leaders whose domains lay partially within the borders of the Twelfth Congressional District. “Willie felt the white boys were going to get out the vote for him,” Mrs. Chisholm says flatly.
The third candidate who ran in the Democratic primary was Dolly Robinson, a former co-leader of Bertram Baker’s. Assemblyman Baker of the Fifty-Sixth A.D. (and the co-sponsor of the famous Metcalf-Baker open-housing law) had his own axes to grind in the primary. Thompson and he had had a serious falling out over a past judicial contest, and Thompson had formed his own club in Baker’s district and was now challenging the aging Baker for the leadership. Baker toyed briefly with the idea of supporting Judge Jones—but Jones was a Kennedy man and Baker was strong for Johnson and Humphrey. Baker felt he couldn’t quite support Mrs. Chisholm, either. On the floor of the Assembly one day, Mrs. Chisholm had made an unfortunate and devastating wisecrack concerning Baker. His pride wounded on all fronts, Baker put up a spoiler candidate. “But I think he was glad I won,” Mrs. Chisholm relates. “He came over and hugged me afterward.”
With Dolly Robinson running as the Humphrey candidate, and Thompson looking like the Kennedy candidate, who was there left for Mrs. Chisholm? The Coalition for a Democratic Alternative began getting little nibbles from her. The nibbles culminated in a half-hour telephone conversation between candidate Chisholm and candidate Eugene McCarthy. (The call was placed by the Senator.) Mrs. Chisholm discontinued her tenuous relations with the McCarthy people after Robert Kennedy died.
It was sticky politics, this three-way race for a black Democratic nominee, and it was for this reason, says Stanley Steingut, that he chose to remain aloof from it. “Why should I get involved in a battle between Brooklyn legislators?” he asks. Mrs. Chisholm, however, remains firm in her conviction that Steingut did get involved, and in Thompson’s corner. “Never before in the history of Kings County did a county leader throw the choice of Congressman to the people,” she exclaims. That is probably true, and Mrs. Chisholm made capital of it in her campaign. Her slogan, “Unbought and Unbossed,” managed to tar Thompson with the support he might or might not have had.
Mrs. Chisholm likes to campaign. “I am the people’s politician,” she says. “If the day should ever come when the people can’t save me, I’ll know I’m finished. That’s when I’ll go back to being a professional educator.” The candidate chose as her campaign manager an old pro named Wesley Holder who had been in and out of various Bedford-Stuyvesant political factions for more than a decade. She enlisted Julius C. C. Edelstein, a former factotum in reform politics and a onetime Wagner aide, as financial adviser and behind-the-scenes éminence grise. In addition to the forces of the Unity Club, her home base, Mrs. Chisholm developed a small army of women who roamed the district in her behalf.
“The women are fierce about Shirley,” says her husband. “She can pick up the phone and call two hundred women and they’ll be here in an hour. And she gives them nothing more than a ‘thank you’ and a buffet supper.”
“It stings the professional boys,” adds the Congresswoman. “All I have to say is, ‘We gotta go to war.’ ”
Chisholm’s war was fought from a sound truck. The way she recounts it, the truck would pull up to a housing project such as the Brevoort Houses with a retinue of private cars in its wake: “I’d get up there and say ‘Ladies and Gentlemen of the Brevoort Houses, this is Fighting Shirley Chisholm coming through.’ I have a way of talking that does something to the people,” she adds. “Meanwhile, my workers would scatter in all directions with shopping bags filled with literature. We’d hand out two thousand pieces at each stop. I have a theory about campaigning. You have to let them feel you.”
Despite the knockdown, drag-out contest, the voter turnout on June 18 in the Twelfth District was among the lowest in the city. Pundits had predicted a Thompson victory. “You could have won any kind of money on that,” Tommy Fortune chuckles. But when the figures were in, the Unity Club had given Chisholm a 1,265-vote cushion. It was more than enough to cover her losses in other areas. Chisholm won her primary by 788 votes.
In July, the victorious nominee entered the hospital for an operation on a massive fibroid tumor. At the Democratic convention in Chicago (which she sat out in a hotel room), Mrs. Chisholm emerged as the choice of all factions of New York State’s delegation for the post of national committeewoman, replacing Edna Kelly.
Anyone with less than a keen interest in local politics might have concluded that “what was happening” in Bedford-Stuyvesant was the campaign of James Farmer. The former national director of CORE had been at loose ends since he resigned his post a few years back to head up a Johnson Administration literacy program which never came into being. Early in the spring, Farmer announced his entry into the Twelfth District race as the candidate of the Liberal party. In May, the nationally known civil rights spokesman was accorded the Republican designation.
Farmer’s Republican blessing did not come easily. According to Mrs. Chisholm, who maintains that three of the local Republican leaders worked quietly for her in the general election, the Brooklyn Republicans were subjected to outside pressure from as far away as Senator Charles Percy of Illinois. “They felt it was a terrible intrusion,” she states. “It was saying to them, ‘You don’t have anybody worthwhile for this $30,000 [now $42,500] fruitcake.’ It was a slap in the community’s face. Everybody, Republican, Democrat, black and white, male and female, resented the intrusion.”
Farmer, who lived in Manhattan took an apartment on Herkimer Street near Nostrand Avenue in the district for a mailing address. He attempted rapprochement with Sonny Carson’s breakaway chapter of Brooklyn CORE, which had been making anti-Farmer noises in the community and had even tried to field a Congressional candidate of its own. Brooklyn CORE was an embarrassment to the former CORE chief, but the eventual détente did little to help him. Sonny Carson’s strength, whatever it might be, was not on the election rolls. Nixon-Agnew at the head of the Republican ticket also proved embarrassing. Farmer favored Humphrey (and so did the Liberal party—strongly). His strategy was to attack the Nixon-Agnew team freely during the campaign and urge the electorate to go into the polls and “Vote Farmer First.”
Bongo drums on the streets—a regular part of Farmer’s campaign in Bedford-Stuyvesant—projected an image redolent of Africa and manhood. Farmer’s handbills stressed the need for “a man’s voice” in Washington. This may have been what the Moynihan Report was talking about, but it didn’t sit well with Shirley Chisholm. In her Washington office desk Mrs. Chisholm keeps a long scathing poem called “Mrs. Moynihan in Bedford-Stuyvesant” written by a (male) student in Harvard’s Afro-American Association. “Of course we have to help black men,” the Congresswoman says. “But not at the expense of our own personalities as women. The black man must step forward, but that does not mean we have to step back. Where have we ever been? For the last fifteen years, black men have held political office, not women.”
The black male mystique stung Shirley Chisholm (she recalls walking into public meetings and being greeted by the catcall, “Here comes the black matriarch!”), but the unspoken truth of the Farmer campaign was that Farmer’s “black male” image had a double edge. The women of Bedford-Stuyvesant knew without being reminded that James Farmer had a white wife.
The Farmer-vs-Chisholm campaign attracted national coverage, but from network television down to The Village Voice, the focus was on James Farmer and not Shirley Chisholm. The Chisholm camp found N.B.C.’s weekend special, “The Campaign and the Candidates,” particularly galling. The half-hour show devoted itself almost exclusively to Farmer. N.B.C. newsfolk still insist that they were justified. Farmer was a “national figure” who made the story “newsworthy.” His campaign was “highly visible and colorful” while Mrs. Chisholm’s was restricted because she was still recuperating from her operation. But from Chisholm’s vantage point, and the vantage point of hindsight, the show was a serious misreading of local politics.
One N.B.C. reporter, the local station’s Gabe Pressman, did not believe that Farmer was a shoo-in. Pressman spent a half day on the Chisholm campaign trail and returned to his office convinced that Mrs. Chisholm had it. He had accompanied her to a project, the Alabama Houses, and the response she had received there was convincing stuff. Pressman was right, of course, but he never knew how carefully his day with Mrs. Chisholm had been planned. The Unity Club’s captain for the Alabama Houses was none other than Conrad Chisholm.
When Mrs. Chisholm is feeling sour, she says that “any Republican the local leaders might have chosen would have run better than Farmer.” When she is feeling more charitable, she avows that, “Farmer ran about as well as any Republican could” in the district. There is no doubt that Farmer picked up a number of “identification votes” from those who went into the polls and pulled the lever for the name they most readily recognized. And, according to Julius Edelstein, “The male thing made inroads among voters who sincerely, if mistakenly, chose to believe in it.” But Farmer’s entry into the race had been a mistake from the very beginning. Mrs. Chisholm whipped “the national figure” (her pet name for him) by almost 2½ to 1. (Getting whipped by a woman did no permanent damage to either James Farmer or William C. Thompson, apparently. Thompson was subsequently named to fill a City Council vacancy; President Nixon appointed Farmer Assistant Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.)
Washington’s introduction to Fighting Shirley Chisholm and Representative Chisholm’s introduction to Washington were not accomplished without a few surprises on both sides. A couple of weeks after Mrs. Chisholm moved into a furnished apartment in one of the capital’s newer residential complexes, the apartment was broken into while she was weekending in New York. The thief or thieves made off with her new Washington wardrobe, a collection of knit suits. Mrs. Chisholm moved to another address and charged that the theft had all the markings of an “inside job.”
Mrs. Chisholm would just as soon not have talked to anyone (except the police) about the burglary, but she finds it difficult to escape the attentions of the news media. It is a rare day when her appointments calendar does not show at least one interview—she is good copy for political reporters across the United States, for European journalists, members of the Negro press, the women’s pages, the college press, and Washington’s regular Capitol Hill corps, and all of the above-named’s radio and TV counterparts. In fact, anyone with a notebook or a tape recorder considers Mrs. Chisholm fair game.
Sheer instinct for self-survival has led her to develop a set patter, with variations as the mood or occasion strikes her. Chisholm on Chisholm does not always achieve its intended effect. A speech she gave at a gala press reception went something like this, according to the notes of one women’s page reporter: “They call me Fighting Shirley Chisholm. My mother tells me I was born fighting. She says I was kicking so hard in the womb, she knew I was aching to get out and fight.” According to the reporter, the raised eyebrows around the room were something to see. “My dear!” the reporter says. “The womb? Really. Maurine Neuberger didn’t open her mouth the first year she was here.” The womb image may have been a bit much even for Chisholm, and she dropped it after that night.
Shirley St. Hill Chisholm was born forty-four years ago in Brooklyn, shipped back to Barbados at age three to live with her grandmother, and returned to Brooklyn at age eleven. Her father was an unskilled laborer and her mother worked as a domestic to help support her brood. Shirley was the oldest of four girls. A more credible anecdote of her early precocity she recounts with pride: “Mother always said that even when I was three, I used to get the six- and seven-year-old kids on the block and punch them and say, ‘Listen to me.’ I was a fat little thing then, believe it or not.”
Little Shirley grew up with a strong sense of her own destiny. Her early heroes were Mary McLeod Bethune, Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony. Miss Anthony, the homeliest of the suffragettes, was one of the movement’s best speakers. In her Brooklyn campaign, Mrs. Chisholm would reel off a long quotation from Miss Anthony (“The hour is come when the women will no longer be the passive recipients…”) when she was bothered by male hecklers on street corners. “It always stopped them cold,” she reports.
Mrs. Chisholm matriculated at Brooklyn College (she won a scholarship and was in the debating society) and took her master’s at Columbia. She went the route that bright black women who are determined to better their lives find most readily open to them: she became a teacher, and served for a time as director of a day-care center. She was introduced to her future husband in Brooklyn. Conrad was from Jamaica. “I used to kid him,” she says, “that Jamaican men always want the best so he just had to marry a Barbadian girl.” The Chisholms have made a ritual of taking their yearly vacation in the islands. (This summer the routine may be broken. Mrs. Chisholm has her eye on an African tour.)
When Mrs. Chisholm began to fashion her political career, her husband assigned himself the task of shepherding her from meeting to meeting, trying to get her to appointments within a reasonable time (Mrs. Chisholm always runs late). In Washington, Mrs. Chisholm is escorted to and from her engagements off the Hill by any one of her office assistants. Representative Chisholm’s office, on the street floor of the Longworth Building, has a staff of six women, four black and two white, with a median age of twenty-four. Three of the girls were aides to former Congressman Joseph Resnick of Ellenville. The Chisholm outer office has an unusual feminine ambience: the girls are more attuned to each other’s incipient moods and sniffles than a male or mixed staff would be. None of the girls are from Brooklyn. Mrs. Chisholm was forced to sacrifice some patronage for a staff which knew its way around the Hill. (Maneuvering the marble corridors of Congress is a challenge to any freshman legislator.)
Apart from an abrasive administrative assistant, who is working her way into the job (she held a lesser post with Resnick), and whom Mrs. Chisholm defends vociferously (“She’s tough,” says the Congresswoman, “and that’s what I need.”), the staff appears to be hardworking and courteous. “But you can tell Mrs. Chisholm’s new,” sighed one of the girls on a recent morning. “She still wants us to let her open all the mail that’s marked personal.” (Mail to the Chisholm office in these early weeks, admittedly a staggering load, has had a tendency to go unanswered.)
On any given day, the Chisholm office is bolstered by no fewer than three student volunteers who are there to “observe” for their college courses and to “pitch in” wherever they can be of use, which generally means running to the library to research facts for legislative aide Shirley Downs. Miss Downs, along with secretary Carolyn Jones, has managed to bring whatever order there is to the hectic office. She marvels over her new boss: “She’s like a vacuum cleaner. I mark stuff for her to read and the next day she comes in and says, ‘Let’s get together at two o’clock and discuss it.’ She reads anything and everything. The other day she waltzed out of here with ‘The Valachi Papers.’ ”
Mrs. Chisholm is valiantly trying to arrange her Washington life along the pattern of her stay in Albany. Beset by telephone calls, both political and social, from Washington’s Negro community, which feels that the nation’s first black Congresswoman would make an important addition to their parties and their causes, Mrs. Chisholm has tried to make her Washington apartment into something of a retreat, and she guards her after-hours privacy like a watchdog, preferring solitude to sociability. Her home telephone number in Washington is a closely kept secret, and she recently disconnected her listed New York telephone number and arranged to have the calls transferred to her newly opened district office on Eastern Parkway, manned by former campaign manager Wesley Holder. (Mrs. Chisholm is available to her constituents at her Eastern Parkway office on Fridays from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.)
The November elections brought the number of Negro representatives in the House up to nine, “hardly an explosion of black political power,” as Ebony magazine put it, but a tangible gain. Joining Mrs. Chisholm as freshman Democrats are the gregarious Louis Stokes of Ohio, that state’s first black representative, and smooth, young William L. Clay of Missouri, a first for his state as well. With Powell back (though just barely) and John Conyers of Michigan facing stiff competition from the newcomers (Conyers moved into a power vacuum during the Powell difficulties), there is active speculation on the Hill over the eventual pecking order of the new black lineup. “We watch each other,” Mrs. Chisholm admits, “and the boys keep a special eye on Conyers.” (The “watching” is done informally. No “black caucus” has yet emerged in the Ninety-First Congress.)
According to some experienced Washington hands, Mrs. Chisholm’s well-publicized battle over her committee assignment ended in a standoff. Mrs. Chisholm is inclined to disagree. She did manage to turn an unexpected spotlight on the House’s seniority system, and, she is quick to point out, the Veterans Affairs Committee does have some relevance to her community. There is a Veterans Administration hospital in Brooklyn and Mrs. Chisholm intends to use her position on the committee to “make people more aware of their eligibility for the hospital and other veterans’ benefits.”
Apart from the committee-assignment squabble, Mrs. Chisholm’s legislative activities in the first sluggish weeks of Congress have included endorsing a fistful of bills sponsored by other black and/or liberal Congressmen, and making a fiery maiden speech. She has lent her name to an omnibus $30-billion-per-annum “Full Opportunity Act” put forward by Conyers; a Martin Luther King national holiday bill, also introduced by Conyers; a bill to set up a study commission on Afro-American history and culture, sponsored by James Scheuer of New York; a bill to abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee (dropped into the legislative hopper by Don Edwards of California before HUAC underwent its name change to the House Internal Security Committee); a bill to broaden the powers of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, sponsored by Jonathan Bingham of New York; a bill to create a Cabinet-level Department of Consumer Affairs, sponsored by Benjamin Rosenthal of New York; a bill to repeal provisions of the Social Security Act which limit the number of children in a family that can receive welfare payments under the Aid to Dependent Children clauses (sponsored by James Corman of California); and a resolution urging that food and medical supplies be rushed to the Biafra-Nigeria war zone. Mrs. Chisholm expects to work up legislation of her own on man-power training, and would like to initiate a federal program along the lines of New York State’s SEEK.
In her maiden speech late last month, Mrs. Chisholm (who came late to an anti-Vietnam war position) declared that she would oppose every defense money bill “until the time comes when our values and priorities have been turned right side up again” and called upon “every mother, wife and widow in this land” to support her position. Whether the fiercely idealistic, unbargaining Chisholm manner is as effective in Washington as in Brooklyn remains to be seen. (Also during her first weeks in Congress, Chisholm let it be known that she had quite a flair for keeping her name before the public: she announced she was “seriously considering” becoming a candidate for Mayor of New York.)
Like most other Congressmen from New York, Mrs. Chisholm commutes, arriving in Brooklyn on Thursday evening and taking the last Sunday shuttle back to Washington. After her victory, the Chisholms gave up their rented quarters and bought their first home, a nine-room attached row house on St. John’s Place in the district. A large, hand-colored photograph of Mrs. Chisholm dominates one wall of the new living room, the décor of which is decidedly Victorian. A baby grand piano is squeezed into a space along the opposite wall. Next to reading, the Congresswoman prefers to relax by playing the piano. Mrs. Chisholm could never be called an underachiever. She also likes to dance, and has entered and won several Latin dance competitions. And she is a bit of a writer; some of her poems, mainly political, have appeared in the Albany papers and The Amsterdam News.
The new Chisholm residence is just outside the Unity Club’s territory, and while this happenstance in itself is not particularly significant, Mrs. Chisholm made it plain after her election that she intends to be the Congressman for the whole district—a statement interpreted by some observers to mean that she intends to cut her ties with Unity. Her future relations with Unity are one subject which the outspoken lady refuses to clarify. Tommy Fortune says merely, “She knows better than to pick a battle with her own leader and her home base.” Fortune, who admits that he sometimes finds it easier to deal with Congressman Chisholm through Conrad Chisholm, is one who did not think Chisholm’s balk on the Agriculture assignment was good politics.
Mrs. Chisholm does not care to be beholden to anybody. “Don’t talk to me about those reform Coalition for a Democratic Alternative people,” she explodes. “They always try to claim me for their own because my views on legislation are progressive. Reformers? I have another name for them. We in the black community have to be very careful whom we associate with. My husband is a former private investigator. I have dossiers on people.” Whether or not she actually has dossiers is debatable. (Unity Club members remember hints about dossiers in the old days.) Mrs. Chisholm’s sharp tongue is hardly reserved for reformers. She doesn’t mind referring to super-black militants as “woolly-heads” and “spear carriers” when it is they who get her back up, as they did at one memorable meeting of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. White liberals? Mrs. Chisholm says archly, “Don’t you know that white liberals are our favorite parlor conversation?” The result of Mrs. Chisholm’s free-swinging rhetoric is to keep her allies and potential allies slightly off-balance, which is no doubt where she wants them. “Some of these politicians,” she concedes, “think I’m half crazy, that I don’t know what I’m doing. Good. Let them think that,” she finishes coolly.
She is expert at picking her way through the thorny racial issues facing black and white these days and she exhibits a fine disregard for both the fears and the panaceas now in vogue. Black anti-Semitism is one issue for which she has little patience. “I wish to God the mass media would stop playing it up,” she implores. “Don’t they understand that what is going on is an anti-establishment feeling? Of course it is the Jewish landlord and the Jewish shopkeeper in the ghetto that the black man sees and reacts against, but it is not anti-Semitism that is at work. What worries me more is this new restraint I see on the part of white liberals who profess not to understand why blacks are rising up in such hostile fashion. They were fine when they were relieving their pangs of guilt with their contributions and their participation in the panels and the forum groups, but now that it has come down to the stark reality, when it becomes a matter of putting into practice what you’ve discussed in your forums and panels, you’ve got a lot of hang-ups.”
Mrs. Chisholm views with more than mild suspicion that current catchword, black capitalism. “What is black capitalism?” she says with something between a laugh and a sneer. “A tax-incentive plan for white businessmen? How many black entrepreneurs can they create? The focus must be on the masses of black people who realistically we know can never become capitalists. The focus must be on massive manpower training. Mr. Roy Innis of CORE is rounding up support for his so-called ‘Community self-determination’ bill, and I expect that Mr. James Farmer will probably be its champion in Washington. This is not a bill I think I will support. Just wait, there may be some fireworks.”
In her first, combustive, getting-acquainted weeks in Washington, Mrs. Chisholm has been an instant celebrity on Capitol Hill. As she hurries down a corridor or boards an escalator in her spindly high-heeled shoes and longish skirts, she smiles left and right to those who invariably recognize her. Black maintenance men are treated to a special, warm hello; women secretaries nudge each other and nod happily in her direction. Once inside the leathery, masculine House chamber, she sits regally in her chair, at attention. “That’s the woman who beat what’s his name,” remarked one visitor to the Congressional galleries. In these early weeks, Mrs. Chisholm has made news—and has made the rounds of public functions, party meetings, speaking engagements and televised interviews on the kind of schedule a Mrs. Roosevelt would find exhausting. The demands on her time that come back from her being the nation’s “first black woman Congressman” show no sign of letting up, nor does she seem willing or able to call a halt.
A few weeks ago in Brooklyn, two old friends of Shirley Chisholm were talking about the woman they knew and the public figure—“the national figure”—she has become. As Chisholm-watchers they speculated about what Shirley will do next. “If she buckles down and concentrates on her legislative work, it will be wonderful,” one said. “If they turn her into a symbol, if she just does the ceremonial things, or just goes around making speeches and doing very little else—then it will really be disappointing.” So far Shirley Chisholm has seldom disappointed.