Shirley Chisholm

Catalyst for Change

Barbara Winslow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429972751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A staunch proponent of breaking down racial and gender barriers, Shirley Chisholm had the esteemed privilege of being a pioneer in many aspects of her life. She was the first African American woman from Brooklyn elected to the New York State legislature and the first African American woman elected to Congress in 1968. She also made a run for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 1972. Focusing on Chisholm's lifelong advocacy for fair treatment, access to education, and equal pay for all American minority groups, this book explores the life of a remarkable woman in the context of twentieth-century urban America and the tremendous social upheaval that occurred after World War II.

About the Lives of American Women series: Selected and edited by renowned women's historian Carol Berkin, these brief biographies are designed for use in undergraduate courses. Rather than a comprehensive approach, each biography focuses instead on a particular aspect of a woman's life that is emblematic of her time, or which made her a pivotal figure in the era. The emphasis is on a 'good read', featuring accessible writing and compelling narratives, without sacrificing sound scholarship and academic integrity. Primary sources at the end of each biography reveal the subject's perspective in her own words. Study questions and an annotated bibliography support the student reader.

1

Barbados

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was born in Brooklyn, on November 30, 1924, an American citizen, but she always saw herself as a Barbadian American. Just as the history of Barbados is inextricably linked to the history and development of the United States from its colonial beginnings to the present day, Chisholm could not separate the Bajun from the American. Barbados and Brooklyn formed her character, intellect, political and social awareness, self-confidence, and daring.

Barbados was connected to Britain’s thirteen colonies in the North, later the United States, from the beginning of the English settlements. It was the first port of call for British ships sailing from either African or English ports to North America. The majority of slaves who came to the thirteen colonies had been “seasoned,” or, more accurately, broken, in Barbados before being transported north. Close links were established between Barbados and the Carolinas when in 1670 a permanent colony was established in what is known today as Charleston, South Carolina. Many prominent Barbadian merchants and planters subsequently migrated to South Carolina, maintaining the Barbadian colonial connections. Barbadians contributed knowledge, lifestyle, and a sugar economy, along with place-names and a dialect. Barbados was a continual source of population for the American colonies. While slaves were sent mainly to the southern colonies, a smaller number of white bonded servants escaped, were indentured to northern colonial masters, or as freed people found a way to the North. Barbadian Jews moved to New York City.

Barbados and Barbadians were connected to the centrality of the history of the United States, in particular the patriotic folklore of the American Revolution—and some of its iconic figures. One Barbadian account claims that Crispus Attucks, remembered as the first American to die in the “Boston Massacre,” where Massachusetts colonists fought for freedom from Britain, was originally from Barbados. In 1750 George Washington, first president of the United States, then nineteen years old, accompanied his elder half brother Lawrence, who was suffering from tuberculosis, to Bridgetown. Hoping that the warmer climate and cool breezes would cure Lawrence, the two men stayed for three months. While in Barbados the future first president contracted a mild case of smallpox. Barbados’s climate failed to provide a cure for Lawrence Washington, who upon his return home died shortly thereafter. George Washington’s trip to Barbados was his only venture outside what is now the United States.

The American Revolution further connected Barbados with the new Republic. At the end of the Revolutionary War, there was an exchange of families between the United States and Barbados. Loyalists, those colonists who supported the British Crown, moved to Barbados, while Barbadian sympathizers with the American Revolution settled in what became the United States. Some early Barbadians made lasting contributions to the economic and social life of the United States. One Barbadian family brought cotton plants to Georgia, which became the nucleus for the Sea Island cotton industry.¹

Before Shirley Chisholm’s parents arrived in Brooklyn, New York, other Barbadians played a role in the formation of the US Republic. Prince Hall, for example, an early Barbadian immigrant to the United States, made his mark as an active participant in the struggle for independence, abolition, and education. Born in Bridgetown, Barbados, on or about 1735 to an Englishman and a woman of African descent, he came to America in 1765. He was both an abolitionist and a Mason. Because of his organizing skill, a charter for the establishment of a lodge of African American Masons was issued on April 29, 1787. This authorized the organization in Boston of African Lodge No. 459, a “regular Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons, under the title or denomination of the African Lodge,” with Prince Hall as master. An outspoken abolitionist, he was one of eight Masons who signed a petition on January 13, 1777, requesting that Massachusetts’s state legislature abolish slavery, declaring it as incompatible with the cause of American independence. In addition, he tried unsuccessfully to get free blacks and slaves to be able to enlist in the Continental army. He was later successful in urging Massachusetts to end its participation in the slave trade. He established the first school for African and African American children in his home in Boston in 1800.

In the twentieth century, economic changes were laying a new foundation that would continue the connection between Barbados and the United States. In 1904 the United States’ construction of a canal across the Isthmus of Panama had profound repercussions for the Chisholm family, for Barbados, and for Brooklyn. From 1900 to 1925, more than 300,000 islanders, mainly from Barbados, left their homes to work on the Panama Canal or to immigrate to the States, the majority settling in Brooklyn. More than 10,000 Barbadian men, including Chisholm’s grandfather, having never worked on anything but sugarcane fields, threw off the yoke of planter domination to build the Panama Canal. For the first time in their lives, they earned cash—“Panama Money,” which was sent home, enabling village life to continue. Men were also paid in “Panama Gold.” Muriel Forde, Chisholm’s sister, who lives in Barbados today, recalls that “some of the very old women here in Barbados you see now, you’ll see a gold ring on their finger and they say it’s Panama Gold.”² Chisholm’s grandfather sent money to his daughter Ruby so that she could go to the United States. Ruby Seale, who was born in Christchurch, Barbados, in 1901, arrived in New York City aboard the SS Pocone on March 8, 1921.

Charles Christopher St. Hill, Chisholm’s father, was born in British Guiana, now the independent nation of Guyana. Orphaned by age fourteen, Charles St. Hill and his brother began an odyssey that first took them to Barbados and then to Antilla, Cuba, for a year and finally to the United States. They arrived in April 1923 as part of what has been described as the “West Indian wing of America’s great migration north.” In addition to the 2 million blacks who moved from the American South to northern cities in the early decades of the twentieth century, 300,000 people, like St. Hill, came from the English-speaking Caribbean, looking for work and safety. The majority of these immigrants were from Barbados, and their destination was most often Brooklyn. From 1900 to 1920, the borough’s black population doubled, and by 1930 16 percent of this population had come from the Caribbean.³

Although St. Hill was born in Guiana, he always considered himself a Barbadian. Like the majority of Barbadians, St. Hill settled in Brooklyn and found work and a wife. He and Ruby Seale had known each other slightly in Barbados, and they became reacquainted at one of Brooklyn’s many Bajun social clubs. The two married after a strict traditional courtship. Children followed quickly: Shirley in 1924, Odessa in 1925, and Muriel in 1927. A fourth daughter, Selma, would follow in the midst of the Great Depression.

The St. Hill parents considered themselves American Barbadians, which meant they raised their children as Barbadians. The key characteristics of Barbadian Americans were discipline, thrift, hard work, and ambition. According to Chisholm, other islanders referred to Barbadians as “black Jews.” In addition to these Barbadian characteristics, they were fiercely proud of their heritage, often bragging that Barbados was the first country in the English-speaking Caribbean to emancipate their slaves. Barbadians had two things in mind when they came to Brooklyn. The first was to secure a good education for their children. The people most respected in the Barbadian community were the parents whose children excelled in school. And the second, as Paule Marshall so brilliantly wrote in Brown Girl, Brownstones, a pathbreaking coming-of-age novel about a close-knit community of Barbadian immigrants in Brooklyn, was to own a home—a brownstone home. The St. Hills made sure their children did well in school, and finally in 1945 Charles and Ruby could afford a brownstone home. Muriel St. Hill Forde, who lived in the family’s brownstone for thirty-two years, remembers that “the home is still there. We’ve been there for fifty-eight years … and if anybody asks me where my home is, I still think of that home as my home in Brooklyn.” Muriel recalls with satisfaction that their parents “had achieved their ambitions: a home and education. That’s what they wanted.”⁴

But in the mid-1920s, the dream of a home and a good education was just that: a dream. The unprecedented prosperity of that decade—the booming economy, the expansion of industries—was not enjoyed by the majority of West Indians in Brooklyn. Charles was an unskilled laborer and could not secure factory work. Instead, he had to settle for a low-paying job as a baker’s helper. Although Ruby was a skilled seamstress, she could not hold down a job in a textile factory because of her three rapid pregnancies. With no affordable nursery schools or day care, Ruby could not work outside the home. All she could do to contribute to the household economy was take in sewing. But as the girls got older, the diminutive Ruby found it impossible to manage both this work and three demanding children. Facing the reality of their situation, the St. Hills began to talk about sending their daughters to live temporarily on their maternal grandmother’s farm in Barbados. Returning to the island was not an option for Charles and Ruby, for the economy there was far worse than in Brooklyn.

In November 1929 plans were made for Ruby, the three St. Hill daughters, and four cousins to sail on the Vespress. Trunks were packed and sent ahead to the docks. But five days before the scheduled departure, Ruby announced that they were not going to board that ship. A determined woman, Ruby got on the subway, the seven children in tow, and made her way to the ship line’s booking office to rebook their passage, this time on the Vulcana. A day into their sea voyage, Ruby learned that the Vespress had sunk. From that moment on, Charles never questioned his wife’s intuition.

The trip to Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados, took nine long seasick days. After making their way through customs and health inspections, the family boarded a rickety bus that took them along the dusty dirt roads to Vauxhall, the Seale family’s village. Emmeline Seale, their grandmother, was waiting for the bus. She was “a tall, gaunt erect Indian looking woman with her hair knotted on her neck,” Chisholm later recalled, adding, “I did not know it yet, but this stately woman with a stentorian voice was going to be one of the few persons whose authority I would never dare to defy.”⁵ After hours of embraces and chatter, the children were taken for baths in a galvanized tub in their grandmother’s backyard. Then, utterly exhausted, they went to bed. Ruby stayed with her daughters for six months, helping them adjust to their new life. Then she returned to Brooklyn. She would not see her children for six years.

Their grandmother was the matriarch of the family, but she did not raise the children. She worked as a domestic for a British family. Her hours were long, and she often walked to work, leaving at sunup and not returning until nine or ten at night. Because of this Ruby’s nineteen-year-old sister, Myrtle, cared for the seven children. On Saturdays they would go with their aunt Myrtle to the village market to sell their vegetables and bargain for kitchenwares. Sunday was devoted to religious observances. Granny Seale would lead the family to the local Methodist church; everyone dressed in their Sunday best. After a long service, the Seales would return home for a big dinner—and then head back to church for more song and prayer. Later in life Chisholm would attribute much of her success to the deep faith first instilled in her in Barbados.

The grandmother’s large house sat on a plot that provided the family’s food: sweet potatoes, yams, corn, tomatoes, and root vegetables. The waters around the island provided abundant seafood, including the Barbadian staple, flying fish. The children were all expected to do chores on the farm, and these including feeding and caring for the chickens, turkeys, and ducks as well as goats, sheep, and cows that provided milk. Whereas the Barbadian Seales saw these animals as livestock and food, the urban Brooklyn children viewed them as pets. They became quite upset when, for one Christmas dinner, a favorite turkey showed up as the main course. Soon enough, though, the seven children became accustomed to Bajun attitudes and life.

Life at their grandmother’s was not all chores and church. The azure blue and crystal-clear water of the Caribbean was just a short walk from the farm. Together, the family would strip naked, swim in the water, and roll in the sand. The greatest punishment Granny Seale could mete out was to take away time at the beach.

Ruby Seale wanted her daughters educated in Barbados, for she believed the school system there would provide a more rigorous education than the public schools in Brooklyn. Here, there was no kindergarten, there was no play time, and the curriculum focused intensely on reading and writing, although students were also expected to study arithmetic, drawing and needlework, geography, and British history. There were also classes in religious and moral instruction, personal hygiene, domestic economics, and vocational training. Each day began with the singing of “God Save the King” and “Rule Britannia,” a reminder that they were all colonial subjects of Great Britain. Strict discipline was enforced throughout the school day.

Five days a week, Aunt Myrtle walked all seven children across the road to the one-room schoolhouse that also served on the weekend as the village Methodist church. A school day lasted eight hours, from eight to four. The 125 students read their lessons aloud, and every child had a blackboard slate and a piece of chalk to practice penmanship and addition. In Barbados, Chisholm noted, teachers and parents were allies against the students. Few parents opposed the common use of corporal punishment, and Chisholm recalls that she got her fair share of floggings. She never complained. And in her autobiography, she credits her ability to speak and write to the strict British-style education of her childhood. Her Barbadian education also contributed to her sense of racial pride. Her schooling was remarkable in that it was run by black administrators, and she was taught by black teachers—something she would never experience as a student or educator in Brooklyn.

The Barbados of 1928 was not quite the idyllic paradise Chisholm describes in her autobiography. It was an impoverished island, dominated by a white planter class, the majority of its black inhabitants landless, unemployed or poorly paid, uneducated, and chronically sick. But during Shirley’s years on Emmeline Seale’s farm, black Barbadians were beginning to challenge both the planter class and the British Crown. Political disturbances swept through the countryside—there was widespread looting of potato fields and plantation supplies. Socialists, unionists, and anticolonial activists began organizing in the towns and countryside. The men in the villages went into Bridgetown, the center of political organizing and social unrest, to seek employment; women went into town to sell their wares. Shirley’s uncle Lincoln worked for a Bridgetown newspaper and had to have been involved in or at least aware of the tremendous social protest.

During her years on Granny Emmeline’s farm, Shirley St. Hill developed a strong sense of self. She was raised by two strong, hardworking women, her grandmother and aunt, which no doubt shaped her later feminist consciousness. Living through the early years of the struggle for the modern Barbadian nation gave her an understanding of the need to stand up and fight for one’s principles, self-respect, as well as independence from oppressive and racially unjust relationships—whether personal or imbedded in economic or social relationships. And despite the dominance of wealthy whites and the British government, she had other daily role models in her teachers, the ministers, the tradespeople, newspaper editors, police, and even politicians who looked like her and her family, giving her a strong sense of racial pride and identity. “Granny gave me strength, dignity, and love,” Chisholm told the New York Times in 1972. “I learned from an early age that I was somebody. I didn’t need the black revolution to teach me that.”⁶ Gloria Steinem, Chisholm’s friend and sister activist, suggested, in 2008, that Shirley’s regal bearing and habit of speaking of herself in the third person, for which she would later become famous, “may have developed because a little bit of those British queenly images … rubbed off.”⁷

2

Brooklyn

By 1933 the St. Hill family in Brooklyn was suffering the consequences of the 1929 stock market crash. Although many Americans endured poverty, joblessness, and often homelessness during the Depression, African Americans, and especially unskilled African American laborers like Charles St. Hill, fared the worst. In spite of the family’s hard work and frugality, they could not save any money. The birth of their fourth daughter, Selma, put more strain on the family finances, as it made working difficult for Ruby St. Hill. Nevertheless, the St. Hills missed their other daughters so much that they decided to bring them back from Barbados. When ten-year-old Shirley St. Hill arrived on March 19, 1934, she had only dim recollections of her birthplace, little knowledge of Brooklyn’s place in the world, and of course no idea how its history would shape her own future development. Young Shirley had just been transported from a nurturing, sheltered rural way of life to an urban world dominated by hierarchies of class, race, gender, and ethnicity. Just as her Bajun experience shaped Chisholm’s worldview, her life in Brooklyn gave her the context for her future political philosophy and her electoral ambitions.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Brooklyn was the most populous borough in New York City. Between 1900 and 1920, its population rose to 2.5 million, and the number of citizens of color tripled to almost 70,000. Much of its population growth came from the two wings of the Great Migration—the movement of some 2 million blacks out of the American South to cities in the Midwest, Northeast, and West, and the emigration of 300,000 people from the English-speaking Caribbean. By 1930 16 percent of Brooklyn’s black population had come, like the St. Hills, from the Caribbean.

Ruby Seale St. Hill and her daughters Shirley, Muriel, and Odessa arrived in Brooklyn on a cold March day. For the young Shirley, Brooklyn was an alien and terrifying place. First and foremost, it was cold. It was cold outside and it was cold inside, for the St. Hills lived in a four-room cold-water railroad flat, heated only by a coal stove in the kitchen. The family never used their parlor in the winter because it could not be heated. When their mother left the apartment to go shopping, the girls would stay in bed all day, just to keep warm. Throughout her life, Chisholm commented on her fear of the cold.

The St. Hills now liv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction
• 1 Barbados
• 2 Brooklyn
• 3 All Politics Is Local
• 4 Black Power
• 5 New York State Assemblywoman
• 6 I Am Woman
• 7 An Unquiet Congresswoman
• 8 Testing the Presidential Waters
• 9 On the Chisholm Trail
• 10 Political and Personal Transformations
• 11 Conclusion
• Primary Documents
• STUDY QUESTIONS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX