Shirley Chisholm

From her college years, Chisolm was politically active. Her drive and desire to make positive change led her to many political firsts, including being the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
are going to talk about Shirley Chisholm. She has been
on my list for a really long time, but we're

(00:24):
coming up on the fiftieth anniversary of her becoming the
first black woman elected to the US Congress. I think
this episode is actually coming out on that anniversary, so
it seems like a really good time to move her
up from the top of the list. She's also making
appearance on this day in History Class, so it is
great to be able to research two different shows at
the same time. Who Uh. Shirley Chisholm was born Shirley

(00:47):
Anita st. Hill on November in Brooklyn, New York. Her
parents were both immigrants to the United States. Her mother, Ruby,
was from Barbados and immigrated to the U. S and
n Shirley's father, Charles, was born in British Guiana which
is now just Guiana, and he lived in Barbados in
Cuba before arriving in the US. N And even though

(01:09):
he had been born in South America, he always thought
of himself as Barbadian. Charles and Ruby had met in
Barbados before they each, independently of one another, immigrated to
the United States. They both moved to Brooklyn, which had
a significant population of Caribbean immigrants. At least sixteen percent
of Brooklyn's black residents were from the Caribbean. Charles and

(01:29):
Ruby became reacquainted in Brooklyn, and they got married after
a short but very strict and traditional courtship. The st
Hills went on to have four daughters. Shirley was the
oldest and was followed by Odessa, Muriel, and Selma. Charles
and Ruby raised their daughters to be disciplined, thrifty, and
hard working Christians. They also had two very clear goals

(01:50):
for their family. They wanted to own their home and
they wanted all of their daughters to go to college.
But money was a very serious obstacle to both of
these goals. Charles was a laborer and his job as
a baker's assistant was very low paying. There weren't really
any options for affordable childcare either, so Ruby couldn't work

(02:11):
outside the home. Once she started having children, She tried
to help make ends meet by taking in sewing, but
it was just not enough money for them to save
for a home or for a college education for their daughters,
so in before their youngest daughter, Selma, was born, the
st Hills decided to send Shirley, Odessa, and Muriel to Barbados. There,

(02:32):
they would live with Ruby's mother and be raised with
the help of a sister, and the girl's education was
part of this decision. Ruby thought that they would get
a better education in Barbados, where schools were strict and
focused on reading, writing, and arithmetic, rather than in the US,
which had widely adopted kindergarten and play based learning in
the early grades. Ruby traveled to Barbados with her daughters

(02:54):
and four of their cousins and she stayed there for
six months before going back to Brooklyn. And of course,
life in Barbados was dramatically different from what the girls
had been used to back in the States. They went
from living in a densely populated city to living on
a farm, and their chores on the farm included caring
for the animals and vegetables that would help be the family.

(03:15):
The culture shock was repeated when the st Hills decided
to bring their daughters back from Barbados when Shirley was ten.
She had left for Barbados at the age of three,
and she had very little memory of Brooklyn by the
time she got home again. In Barbados, she had been
living in a close knit community where everyone knew each other,
but Brooklyn was full of strangers that she wasn't supposed
to talk to. The people around her in Brooklyn were

(03:37):
also very different. At the time, the st Hills were
living in Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood, which was predominantly Jewish and
included a lot of immigrants from Eastern Europe, as well
as people from Italy, Puerto Rico, and Syria. In Barbados,
they had been surrounded almost entirely by other Barbadians. Shirley
also started seeing racial prejudice and discrimination after getting back

(03:59):
to the US. There was, of course racism in Barbados,
which was still under British colonial rule and was home
to a growing movement for independence and civil rights, but
since they had been living on a farm in a
rural area, it just was not something that the children
were conscious about day to day. In Brooklyn, however, racial
disparities were obvious. For example, Shirley went from attending a

(04:22):
school in Barbados that had black teachers and staff to
one in Brooklyn in which nearly all the teachers and
administrators were white. The family also experienced poverty in both
Barbados and Brooklyn. Like The reason that the st Hills
had not all gone to Barbados together was that that
would have been even harder than having the parents in
New York and the children and Barbados. But the experience

(04:45):
of poverty was completely different in these two places. And Barbados,
they were poor, but they were able to raise their
own food, and they were surrounded by a community of
people who were in very similar circumstances, and they all
worked to support and nurture each other. But in Brooklyn
they faced social stigma about being poorer. On top of
hunger and a lack of resources, it was also cold.

(05:07):
Apart from the temperature differences between New York and the Caribbean,
parts of the st Hill home in Brooklyn had no heat.
Based on her age and her education in Barbados surely
should have started sixth grade when she came back to
the US, but she was placed in third grade instead.
Her skills in subjects like reading and writing were really good,
but because she hadn't been attending school in the United States,

(05:30):
she knew very little about US history and geography. Naturally,
she was bored and unchallenged, and she dealt with it
by misbehaving in class. Fortunately, her teacher realized exactly what
was going on right away and arranged for her to
have a tutor. Within eighteen months, she had surpassed her
peers of her own age and had grown to really

(05:51):
love school, and that was something that would continue for
the rest of her education. In nineteen thirty six, the
st Hills moved from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood to Bedford Stuyvesant.
With all the girls in school, Shirley's mother was able
to work again and she got a job as a
domestic Shirley became responsible for her younger sisters, so she
would pick them up to go home for lunch, take

(06:12):
them back to school, and then after school she would
pick them up again and look after them until after
their mother got home. Ruby was still really involved in
her daughter's lives and their education. Now. Sometimes she would
do her daughter's chores so that they could spend more
time on their school work, and then she also took
them on regular trips to the public library and asked
them lots and lots of questions about the books that
they were reading before their next trip. Shirley entered Girls

(06:36):
High School in Brooklyn in nineteen thirty nine, and she
graduated in nineteen forty two. She excelled there and she
got scholarships to Vassar and Oberlin, but the st. Hills
could not afford to pay for room and board at
either of those schools, so instead, Shirley entered Brooklyn College
in the fall of nineteen forty two. The racial disparities
that Shirley had experienced in her education so far continued

(06:59):
when she got to college. Even though Brooklyn had a
significant black population, there were only about sixty black students
at the college. That was out of roughly ten thousand
graduate and undergraduate students. Most of the teachers and administrators
were also white, and the entirety of the student council
was white. When Shirley was growing up, her parents had

(07:19):
been very strict and very focused on her schooling, and
that continued to be true when she started college. During
her first year, she spent most of her time studying,
and she did not have much of a social life,
but she really thrived in college and ultimately joined the
Harriet Tubman Society, the Debating Society, the Brooklyn chapter of
the nub A c P, and the Brooklyn Urban League.

(07:42):
She majored in sociology and minored in Spanish, and she
graduated with honors in nineteen forty six. Shirley also started
on the path to politics while she was in college.
She joined the seventeenth Assembly District Democratic Club, and she
also met Wesley McDonald holder, who was known as Mack
during her senior year. He was a political organizer and

(08:03):
was nicknamed the Dean of Black Brooklyn politics. He would
become her political mentor. One of her professors also told
her during class that she should go into politics, and
she replied, you forget two things. I'm black and I'm
a woman. But she did go into politics, which we
were going to talk about after we first paused for
a little sponsor break. After graduating from college, surely st

(08:33):
Hill lived with her parents, who had saved up enough
money to buy a home thanks to her father's work
in a factory during World War Two. For a while,
she struggled to find a job. Though she was very diminutive,
I mean just tiny, and she spoke with a slight lisp,
so people had trouble believing that she was really a
college graduate. Repeatedly, she would interview for jobs that she

(08:55):
met the qualifications for, only to be told that she
did not actually meet them. She was finally hired at
Mount Cavalry child Care Center in Harlem, and she worked
there from nineteen forty six to nineteen fifty three. She
also started a master's degree program in early childhood education
at Columbia Teachers College. She took classes at night while

(09:16):
working at the child care center during the day. In
nineteen forty nine, she married Conrad Chisholm, who had emigrated
to the United States from Jamaica. They moved into a
home near Shirley's parents. At first, they hoped to have children,
but Shirley had two miscarriages, and later on she said quote,
if I had children, I couldn't be out here doing
what I'm doing now. She also finished her master's degree

(09:39):
in nineteen fifty one. Shirley Chisholm had been active in
the seventeenth Assembly District Democratic Club since college, and in
ninety three she took part in her first political campaign,
a seat had opened up in the second Municipal Court,
which was local to where she lived. Chisholm worked with
the campaign to elect Louis S. Flag, Jr. Who became

(10:00):
Brooklyn's first black judge, which was a huge milestone. Campaign
workers tried to keep this momentum going by reforming the
Flag campaign into the Bedford Stuyvesant Political League or BSPL.
Chisholm became its vice president. Chisholm had noticed that in
all the political organizations she was part of, women were
really active, but they were also relegated to tasks like

(10:23):
preparing food, cleaning up and organizing events and raffles. Many
of the organizations were integrated, but essentially segregated themselves when
it came to things like seating arrangements. Chisholm thought all
of that needed to change, so she ran for president
of the BSPL. This led to problems because her opponent
was her long time mentor Mac Holder. She lost this election,

(10:47):
but the fact that she had run against him at
all led to a huge rift between the two of them.
In ninety eight, at the age of thirty four, Chisholm
left both the seventeenth Assembly District's Democratic Club, the BSPL,
feeling frustrated and like as a woman, she didn't have
any future and politics beyond canvassing and cleaning up after meetings.

(11:09):
In nineteen fifty nine, Chisholm became a consultant to the
New York City Division of Daycare, and in nineteen sixty
she returned to politics. She and several others who had
been part of the Flag campaign started the Unity Democratic Club,
which was racially integrated and which had women in many
prominent positions. This eased some of Chisholm's frustrations, but at

(11:31):
the same time, she was still doing a lot of
work campaigning for other people when what she really wanted
was to be the one running for office. So in
nineteen sixty four, Chisholm told the Unity Democrats that she
wanted to run for state representative. They nominated her, and
she won her first primary and general election. This wasn't, however,

(11:52):
one of her many political firsts. The first black woman
elected to the New York State Legislature was Bessie Buchanan
tens earlier. While a state legislator in Albany, Chisholm introduced
two major pieces of legislation that really illustrate what she
was trying to do in politics. The first set up
unemployment insurance and social security protections for personal and domestic workers.

(12:17):
This was something she'd seen a need for both from
her mother and from so many other working women in
their Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood. The second was the SEEK program,
which stands for Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge, and
it was something she'd seen a need for during her
own education. The SEEK program identified black and Hispanic students
for both financial and academic aid to study at the

(12:39):
City University of New York or the State University of
New York. This program still exists today, and it works
to bridge the gap for financially and educationally underprivileged students.
After a redistricting, Chisholm had to run for re election
in nineteen sixty five, even though her first term wasn't over.
She ran again in the regular election cycle in nineteen

(13:00):
sixty six and was once again reelected. Her other legislation
during those years as a state representative included funding for
daycare centers for the children of working women, and laws
to ensure that teachers didn't lose their seniority if they
went on maternity leave. She also advocated for the repeal
of New York's laws criminalizing abortion, which happened in nineteen

(13:21):
seventy after she had left office. These years in the
state capital were really challenging for Chisholm. She spent about
five days a week in Albany while her husband was
at home in Brooklyn, and her father had also died
the year before she was elected. She and her father
had been very close, and a lot of her earliest
political opinions had been informed through discussions with him about

(13:43):
figures like Marcus Garvey. She had also become somewhat estranged
from her mother and sisters because she inherited her father's
money while they inherited the house. Her isolation in Albany
was professional as well as personal. There were only a
handful of women in the state legislature, and she was
the only black woman. It was socially unacceptable for women

(14:05):
to go out to bars, which is what most of
the men were doing. At the end of the day.
She frequently felt like she was being overlooked, and this
was a pattern in her political career, which would lead
her to say, quote, if they don't give you a
seat at the table, bring a folding chair. In nine
sixty eight, a court ordered reapportionment created a new congressional
district in New York and that was centered on Shirley

(14:28):
Chisholm's neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant. This newly created district was
majority black and it also had a large Puerto Rican population.
It was pretty much taken for granted that the representative
elected from this new district would be black, but it
was also pretty much taken for granted that it would
be a man. Twelve people announced their candidacy, and Chisholm

(14:50):
was the only woman. It was during this campaign that
Chisholm started using the slogan unbought and unbossed. She also
repaired her relationship with mack hole Older, who got in
touch and said that he wanted to be part of
her campaign. Chisholm one the Democratic primary in this election
by a huge margin, and then in the general election,

(15:10):
her opponent was James Farmer, who was running on both
the Republican and Liberal Party tickets. Farmer was the former
head of the Congress of Racial Equality or CORE, as
well as one of its founders. He had also organized
and participated in the Freedom rides, and he had a
whole lot of other people thought his election was a

(15:31):
sure thing. Chisholm and Farmer agreed on a lot of
their key issues. They had essentially the same talking points
on things like housing, employment, and education. Both of them
were also against the Vietnam War, so Farmer's campaign was
less about the issues and more about gender. He framed
himself as a powerful man whose voice was needed in

(15:53):
Washington and dismissed Chisholm as quote some school teacher. Farmer
wasn't the only person focused on gender and this During
the campaign, The New York Times ran this headline, Farmer
and woman in lively Bedford Stuyvesant Race. That makes me
kind of want to grind my teeth, but I'm gonna

(16:14):
keep going. Meanwhile, Chisholm and mac Holder worked day and
night to canvas in campaign. They pointed out that Farmer
lived in Harlem, not Brooklyn. Chisholm was fluent in Spanish
and reached directly out to the district's Puerto Rican voters.
She emphasized all the work that she had done in
Albany that directly affected people in Brooklyn, especially women and women.

(16:38):
Registered voters outnumbered men as registered voters in the district
and the middle of all this, though, Chisholm developed a
fibroid tumor and she had to have surgery, so she
had to take a break from the campaign. Farmer started
playing up her absence from the campaign trail until she
finally defied her doctor's orders. She went out on her
front steps with a bullhorn. This required her to walk

(17:00):
down several flights of steps first, and with this bullhorn
she said, ladies and gentlemen, this is fighting Shirley Chisholm,
and I am up and around in spite of what
people are saying. On November five, Chisholm won the election
against James Farmer thirty four thousand, eight hundred eighty five
votes to thirteen thousand, seven hundred seventy seven. She became

(17:23):
the first black woman elected to Congress and only one
of ten women in Congress that year. The only other
woman of color was Patsy Mink of Hawaii, who was
Japanese American and the first woman of color elected to Congress.
There were also only ten black legislators in Congress that year.
We will talk about her time as a representative and

(17:45):
her run for the presidency after another sponsor break. When
Shirley Chisholm took office as a US Representative from New
York Number one, she referred to herself as a black
woman congressman, which delights me. She also recognized the role

(18:08):
that women had played in getting her elected, and she
recognized the fact that women were largely being excluded from
Washington politics. So to try to start closing that gap
in her first term, she hired only women for her staff.
At the same time, she knew that as a junior
legislator she really needed experienced people to help her in
order to be effective, so a lot of the women

(18:30):
she hired had served on the staff of Joseph Resnick,
who had elected not to run for re election. Almost
immediately after being sworn in, Chisholm started breaking protocol. In Washington.
It was expected for junior legislators to basically listen and
not make waves. But when she got her committee assignment,
it was to the Rural Development and Forestry Committee of

(18:52):
the Agriculture Committee. This was completely outside her experience and
also not particularly relevant to her constituents back in Brooklyn,
New York. She thought this was ridiculous, and she tried
to be recognized to speak to protest it, but every
time she stood up, a more senior representative would stand
up and be called on. Finally, she walked down to

(19:14):
the well at the floor of the House and when
asked what she was doing down there, she said, quote,
I've been trying to get recognized for half an hour,
Mr Chairman, but evidently you were unable to see me,
so I came down to the well. I would just
like to tell the caucus why I vehemently reject my
committee assignment. This was really unheard of. It was not

(19:35):
done among junior legislators, especially to do something like this.
But she was ultimately reassigned to the Veterans Affairs Committee.
This was definitely not her first choice, but it was
at least a place where she felt like she could
serve her constituents because there were plenty of veterans living
in Brooklyn. From there, Chisholm continued to take bold, uncompromising steps.

(19:56):
Her first speech in the House was anti war, and
she announced the she would vote no on every budget
bill until the country started using its resources quote for
people and peace, not profits in war. She also faced
a lot of sexism like questions about what her husband
thought about what she was doing, in a very like
what does your husband think of all this? Darling. In

(20:22):
July of nineteen seventy, during hearings on a House anti
discrimination measure, Chisholm said quote, during my entire political life,
my sex has been a far greater handicap than my
skin pigmentation. From my earliest experience in ward political activity,
my chief obstacle was that I had to break through
the role men assigned women. A young woman in a

(20:45):
newspaper story I read somewhere defined that role beautifully. She
was talking about her experiences in the civil rights movement. Quote,
we found that the men made the policy and the
women made the peanut butter sandwiches. I would like to
comment on the quote really quickly before we move on,
because a lot of people take this out of context

(21:05):
and try to make it be a statement that in general,
in the world, gender is a bigger issue than race,
and that's really not what she was saying. She was
confining this to her political life very clearly, not like
a blanket statement about which thing, being a woman or

(21:26):
being black is harder. Chisholm's agenda in Congress was ambitious,
but it wasn't naive. She wanted more programs for the
poor and unemployed, more support for education, more funding for
health care, and protections for civil rights. She helped form
the Congressional Black Caucus and later the Congresswoman's Caucus, which

(21:46):
is now the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues. On August tventy,
she reintroduced the Equal Rights Amendment, which was passed by
Congress on March ninety two, but was not rat deified
by the states. That could be a whole other podcast,
and maybe will be at some point in the future.

(22:07):
When Chisum ran for re election in nineteen seventy she
won eighty two percent of the vote. That in nineteen
seventy one, she published her autobiography, which was titled Unbought
and Unbossed. By the time Unbought and Unbossed came out,
Chisholm had already been thinking about running for president. In
November of nineteen seventy two, she told her staff that
she planned to run. That same year, she was appointed

(22:30):
to the Education and Labor Committee, which had been one
of her top choices when she was first elected. Chisum
announced her intention to run for president on January nine
seventy two at Conquered Baptist Church in Brooklyn, and her
speech she said, quote, I am not the candidate of
Black America, although I am black and proud. I am
not the candidate of the women's movement of this country,

(22:52):
although I am a woman and I am equally proud
of that. I am the candidate of the people, and
my presence before you now symbolizes a new era an
American political history. With this announcement, Chisholm became the first
black woman to seek the nomination of the Democratic Party.
Sometimes you'll see her listed as the first woman of
any race to seek the nomination for any major political party,

(23:14):
but that is not accurate. Margaret Chase Smith ran for
president as a Republican in nineteen sixty four and had
twenty seven delegates at the Republican National Convention. Patsy Mink,
who we mentioned earlier, also ran as a Democrat in
nineteen seventy two. She had been invited by Oregon Democrats
to run on their ballot to draw attention to the

(23:34):
movement against the Vietnam War, and she withdrew after the
Oregon primary. This has been described as more of a
symbolic campaign, but it still counts as it happened in
her run for Congress, Chisum faced all kinds of sexism.
While running for president, Walter Cronkite started a news broadcast
and about her candidacy by saying a new hat, rather

(23:55):
a bonnet, has been thrown into the ring. She was
also excluded from televised to eights and took her case
to court, at which point the FCC ordered that she
be invited to debate as well. And it wasn't just
gendered language and exclusion from debates. At least three confirmed
assassination threats were made against Chisholm during the campaign. Someone

(24:16):
stole stationary from one of her opponents and typed up
a terribly spelled, badly written press release claiming that she
had been in a mental institution. This release went on
with a whole series of completely fabricated claims and led
to an FBI investigation. As there was obviously racism and
sexism all tied together in the response to her campaign.

(24:40):
But in this campaign, Chisum really hoped to build a
coalition among anyone who was disenfranchised or marginalized, not just
black people and not just women. She was also vocal
in her support of equal rights for Hispanics and Latinos,
as well as gay people and Indigenous people. She had
called to have a Native person leading the Department of
the Interior, wh oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and

(25:03):
she did get a lot of grassroots support. Many of
the people who worked on her campaign were first time
participants in this process. Whenever people asked her what they
needed to do to get involved, she would tell them
the first thing was to register to vote, and this
was just a few years after the Voting Rights Act
of nineteen sixty five outlawed voting discrimination based on race.

(25:24):
But her efforts on the campaign were really hampered by
a lack of money and by disorganization from within the campaign.
She had some high profile celebrity backers like Harry Belafante
and Ascie Davis, but other people weren't as enthusiastic even
when they said they were on her side. Gloria steinhum
ran as one of her delegates in the New York primary,

(25:45):
but kept doing this kind of halfhearted endorsement, saying that
she was for surely Chisholm, but thought George McGovern was
the best of the male candidates. Tis Um finally told
her to either endorse McGovern or her not do this
weird in between things, and she said, quote, don't do
me any favors by giving me this semi endorsement. I
do not need this kind of help. She also faced

(26:07):
criticism after candidate George Wallace was shot on May fifteen,
nineteen two. We've done a podcast on Wallace before, in
case you needed any of that story. Uh. He was
notorious for his views on segregation and race, although during
this campaign he announced that he would no longer support segregation.
Chisholm visited him in the hospital and people were appalled,

(26:29):
but she felt like visiting was just the humane thing
to do, and she told him, quote, you and I
don't agree, but you have been shot and I might
be shot, and we are both children of American democracy,
so I wanted to come and see you. The Democratic
National Convention that year started on July temp and by
that time it was absolutely clear that there was no
way Chisholm was going to get the party's nomination. Instead,

(26:52):
she hoped to have enough delegates to influence the party
platform that would be created at the convention. She wound
up with a hundred and fifty two delegates, which was
about ten percent of the total after being on the
ballot in twelve states. That was more than some of
the other candidates, but not enough to have an impact
on the party platform or her much bigger goal of
naming a black candidate as the vice presidential running mate.

(27:16):
She was also really disillusioned by how the process felt
more like it was about candidates making deals with one
another for their delegates than it was about candidates trying
to do right by the voters. But a more personal
disappointment was that her friend and colleague Ron Delum's of
the Congressional Black Caucus, was supposed to be the person
to nominate her at the convention, but he backed out

(27:38):
at the last minute. Her friend Percy Sutton did it instead.
On the last night of the convention, Shirley Chisholm gave
a speech and which she said she would support the
Democratic Party nominee George McGovern, But before she could give
that speech, she got a lengthy standing ovation. Even though
there were so many disappointments at the Democratic National Convention,

(27:59):
Chisholm and assisted that she did not regret her decision
to run. She said, I ran because somebody had to
do it first. I ran because most people thought the
country was not ready for a black candidate, not ready
for a woman candidate. Someday, it was time in nineteen
seventy two to make that someday come. Later on, she
described her candidacy as not exactly opening the door for

(28:21):
other women and people of color, but at least leaving
the door ajar. In the nineteen seventy two election, George
McGovern was defeated colossally by incumbent Richard Nixon, and just
a huge landslide, like an unmatched landslide. We all know
how that worked out. Though, Chisholm returned to her seat

(28:42):
in the House of Representatives and she spent seven total
terms in the House. In nineteen seventy five, she co
sponsored a bill to expand the federal school lunch program,
and then she led the representatives to overturn President Gerald
Ford's veto of it. In nineteen seventy seven, she also
became part of the House Rules Committee. She was the
first black woman to be on that committee. In her
personal life, she and Conrad Chisom divorced in nineteen seventy seven,

(29:07):
and she remarried Arthur Hardwick Jr. Who lived in Buffalo,
and her later terms in the House of Representatives, Chisholm
didn't defy protocol in the way she had in her
first and over the years the shift started to draw
more and more scrutiny. What she saw as an attempt
for consensus building was seen as being too conciliatory and

(29:27):
not ambitious enough. She was also criticized for increasing time
away from Washington. Some of this was to go on
speaking tours, and some of it was to be with
her second husband after he was permanently and seriously injured
in a car accident. All of this influenced her decision
not to seek re election in nineteen two, but she
was also frustrated by feeling like she was less and

(29:49):
less able to really serve her constituents. Some of this
was due to the shifting political climate of the late
nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties. Her career had really
been focused on helping the needy and protecting the marginalized,
things like an increased minimum wage, unions for domestic workers,
racial equality, gay rights, and daycare for working mothers and

(30:11):
people on public assistance, but it was harder and harder
to get legislation like that past. On top of that,
for a number of economic and social reasons, voters in
her district and in similar districts all around the country
were becoming less and less engaged and politically active, and
that was making it a lot more difficult for her
to secure federal funds that would benefit them. After retiring

(30:35):
from politics, Chisholm became Sherrington Professor of Politics at Mount
Holyoke College in Massachusetts. She commuted back and forth between
the college and Buffalo, where she and her husband lived,
and she helped found the National Political Congress of Black Women,
and she worked on Jesse Jackson's campaign for the presidency.
In four and her husband, Arthur, died in three Shirley

(31:00):
Chisholm was offered the position of ambassador to Jamaica, but
she turned it down because her health was not good anymore.
She died on January one of two thousand five at
the age of eighty, and November of President Barack Obama
posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Later on
in her life, she said that she didn't want to
be remembered just as a member of Congress or a

(31:22):
candidate for president, but as in her own words, a
woman who fought for change in the twentieth century, and
that is Shirley Chisholm. Do you also have listener mail.
I do have listener mail. This is from Thomas and
it is going all the way back to our Magnus
Hirshfeld episode. I know that was a while ago. We

(31:43):
have been recording lots of extra episodes to accommodate our
tour of the West Coast, which I think by the
time this episode comes out will have already happened. But
Thomas says, dear Holly and Tracy, thank you for the
episode on Magnus hersh Field, which I really enjoyed despite
the tragic ending. There is one extra tragic coda to

(32:05):
the fate of gay men in the Holocaust. If they
managed to survive the concentration camps, some were then made
to finish their sentences after the war by the occupying allies.
I can't even begin to imagine how those poor souls
must have felt, knowing they were still not going to
be freed. I think it's pretty little known even today
that that happened. A link to the US Holocaust Museums

(32:26):
article on this. Keep up the good work, especially covering
LGBT history, which even now is barely a footnote in
many school curriculums. Kind regards, Thomas, thank you so much
for this note, Thomas, I did not know that, and
I won't say it was surprising, because it's not. But
it was an upsetting enough idea that I was like,
let me go research this and make sure that this

(32:48):
is correct before we say it on the show. And
it is. So. What happened, as we said at the
end of the Mangus Heirshfeld episode, is that a lot
of gay men were arrested while the Nazis were in power,
and many of them were sent to concentration camps. Then
when the concentration camps were liberated, a lot of these
men had been convicted of violating the anti homosexuality laws

(33:12):
in Germany and they were put into regular prisons to
finish out their sentences, even though they had been in
this concentration camp for a period of years. So like
a lot of them were returned to other prisons afterward
um to basically serve out the sentence they had originally
been given after being convicted, which is indeed horrifying. Um So,

(33:38):
I know that's a very down er place to end
this episode, but I felt like it was an important
piece of additional information to include. If you would like
to write to us about this or any other podcast
or history podcasts at how stuff works dot com. And
then we were also all over social media at missed
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to our website, which is miss history dot com and

(34:01):
you can find a searchable archive of every episode Holly
or every episode ever of the show, as well as
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that you're listening to this podcast. For more on this

(34:23):
and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.