Unbought and Unbossed

by Shirley Chisholm

It grew on me that we, black men especially, were expected to be subservient even in groups where ostensibly everyone was equal.

When I looked at the white people who were doing this, consciously or not, it made me angry because so many of them were baser, less intelligent, less talented than the people they were lording it over. But the whites were in control. We could do nothing about it. We had no power. That was the way society was. I perceived that this was the way it was meant to be: things were organized to keep those who were on top up there. The country was racist all the way through.

I decided that if I ever had a chance, somehow I would tell the world how things were as I saw them.

By the later 1940s, the black community was slowly begin- ning to catch up to Mac's ideas. It was starting to realize that the organization never had and never would pick black candi- dates even if the area became 99 percent black, so black citi- zens would have to organize and fight for candidates of their own. The white power brokers were holding on to every- thing for themselves, throwing out just a few morsels — never even one important job to make the community feel that black people, too, were competent.

I was well on the way to forming my present attitude to- ward politics as it is practiced in the United States: it is a beautiful fraud that has been imposed on the people for years, whose practitioners exchange gilded promises for the most valuable thing their victims own, their votes. And who benefits most? The lawyers. This is true on any level, but at the district politics plane one sees it clearest. There are a few menial jobs for the doorbell ringers, the envelope stuffers, the petition carriers, and the car pool drivers who make the machine go. Some of them get to be chairwomen in govern- ment buildings, or process servers, or guards. But without a legal background, the real patronage is out of their reach. The people are beginning to see through the cheat now. The ones in party work wised up first. They delivered the vote, and then some lawyer, with his shirt and tie, too proud to tramp up and down tenement stairs, got the gravy. That's why black people are apt to laugh when one talks about patronage.

It passed in my first year, and so did two of my other bills. One corrected an outrageous legal discrimination against women schoolteachers. If pregnancy interrupted their careers, they lost their tenure rights. My bill changed that.

One bill that I introduced should become law in every state, but unfortunately it did not succeed even in New York. It would have made it mandatory for policemen to success- fully complete courses in civil rights, civil liberties, minority problems, and race relations before they are appointed to a police department.

Mrs. Kelly's district was horseshoe shaped, almost as weird a crea- tion as the Massachusetts district drawn by Elbridge Gerry in the nineteenth century. A Boston political cartoonist added claws and eyes to that one and christened it a new mythologi- cal beast, the "Gerrymander." If the word had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent it to describe the con- gressional map designed to disenfranchise minorities, espe- cially blacks, in New York City before the middle nineteen sixties.

After the Supreme Court ruled that districts must be of equal size and "compact and contiguous," that kind of out- rageous districting disappeared (although the map makers are getting used to the new rules and are managing to invent new outrages without breaking them).

I didn't have the money for a conventional con- gressional campaign; I had to make up for it with hard work. But I was determined to show them. People had to know that it was possible for someone with decency and a fighting spirit to overcome the system by beating it with its own weapons. For years in Brooklyn and New York City and Albany, I had watched the rotten political system that stands in the way of change, because its operators are beneficiaries of the status quo. They are committed against change, because they have things wired for their benefit now; changing the system to benefit the people more would mean that they would not be the kingmakers and wheeler-dealers any longer, these men who put themselves forward as leaders and guardians of the people. This is the insidious thing we have to fight.

When they counted the primary votes, with a very small turnout, I won by about 1000 votes. Dolly Robinson, as it resulted, didn't cut into my vote; if anything, into Willie's. I carried the four white districts.

One station I called to complain to came right out and told me why. "Who are you?" the man asked. "A little schoolteacher who happened to go to the Assembly."

There is one incident of the campaign I will never forget. Soon after the primary, before the operation, a woman rang my doorbell, and when I answered it she pushed an envelope into my hand. "This is the first, Chisholm," she said. There was $9.69 in the envelope, and I learned that she had col- lected it from a group of people on welfare at a bingo party. I sat down and cried. After she left, I told Conrad, "If I ever had any doubts, I don't now." My campaign was financed that way, and out of my own pocket.

It was not my original strategy to organize woman power to elect me; it was forced on me by the time, place, and circum- stances. I never meant and never mean to start a war between women and men. It is true that women are second-class citi- zens, just as black people are. Tremendous amounts of talent are being lost to our society just because that talent wears a skirt. This is stupid and wrong, and I want the time to come when we can be as blind to sex as we are to color.

The committee meetings are held behind guarded doors, but it is impossible to keep that many congressmen from talk- ing afterward. I learned by the grapevine that the committee had met and assigned me to the Agriculture Committee. Gilbert assured me he had tried to get me a better assignment, but other members confided that he hadn't tried very hard. The Agriculture Committee sounded like a ridiculous assignment for a black member from one of the country's most deprived city neighborhoods, but as a matter of fact it might not have been completely out of line.

Now, I am not a pacifist. Ending the war had not been a major theme of my campaign; it was ninth on a list of nine goals that I had pledged to fight for if I were elected, behind jobs, job training, equality education, adequate housing, en- forcement of antidiscrimination laws, support for day care centers, and several other items. But when President Nixon announced, on the same day, that he had decided that the United States would not be safe until we started to build an ABM system, and that the Head Start program in the District of Columbia was to be cut back for lack of money, that was enough for me. I started working on my maiden speech in the House. For whatever it would be worth, even if it would only get it off my chest, I had to tell the world that it was wrong to plan to spend billions on an elaborate and unneces- sary weapons system when disadvantaged children were get- ting nothing.

Almost every week I see busloads of people who come from all over to work for legislation they want and need. They go through a routine of getting lists of members' names, divid- ing into groups, and calling on congressmen. Sometimes they get an audience, sometimes they have to settle for talking to a staff assistant. But after they leave, nothing has changed. Their efforts do not show in the way the votes are cast. Who is it that Congress represents? Would things be different if citizens were more highly organized and better able to artic- ulate and emphasize their desires? This is a serious problem that has to be solved if the democratic process is going to work in a nation as large and complex as ours.

work to be a major force for change outside the House, even if I cannot be one within it. I still believe that our system of representative government can work.

Most Americans have never seen the ignorance, degrada- tion, hunger, sickness, and futility in which many other Amer- icans live. Until a problem reaches their doorsteps, they're not going to understand. They won't become involved in economic or political change until something brings the seri- ousness of the situation home to them. Until they are threatened, why should they change a system that has been fairly beneficial for a fairly large number of people? It is going to have to be the have-nots — the blacks, browns, reds, yellows, and whites who do not share in the good life that most Americans lead — who somehow arouse the conscience of the nation and thus create a conscience in the Congress. My role, as I see it, is to help them do so, working outside of Washington, perhaps, as much as inside it.

Coalition politics is issue oriented instead of party oriented. It draws together disparate groups, who combine — tempo- rarily, in all probability — around some issue of overriding importance to them at that time and place. By its nature, it confronts the traditional politics of expediency and compro- mise. It is called into being by the failure of compromises and the shabby results of action taken out of expediency. It is not a comfortable kind of political action for its leaders, because it involves creativity, innovation, change, and com- mitment to the people instead of to personal advancement. It means opening up participation to the out-groups as well as the in-groups, and giving real power instead of token representation to the minorities, at the policy-making and administrative levels.

A lot of political organizations are paper tigers, a big lie that old politicians use to scare away the com- petition.

Much of the hypocrisy of Americans on the subject of race seems to be unconscious. Perhaps self-deception would be a better word for it. Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal. Whites are furious when they are accused of it, as the Kerner report accused them when it exposed white racism as the cause of the urban riots of the 1960s. "Who, us?" everyone from President Johnson down demanded in- dignantly. They could not see the truth in front of their eyes.

One experience that keeps recurring to me is a meeting I had just before Christmas 1968 with a group of redcaps from Penn Station. Not many people know that a majority of these porters, elderly men now, have college degrees. When they got out of school during the depression, they discovered that what they had been told about education being the way out of poverty was not true for black men. They have spent their lives growing gnarled and bent carrying white travelers' bag- gage for nickels and dimes. Imagine the waste — the human potential that they once had, the loss to our society when they were denied a chance to serve it as they were ready and able to do. One told me with tears in his eyes, "Keep on fighting, for all the black children." He was reconciled to the fact that it was too late for him to have a fair chance, but he did not want it to happen to another generation.

"What do you Negroes want now?" he asked me. "You all aren't doing too bad. As a matter of fact, you're doing a lot better than some of the white people." My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference. What can I say to a man who asks that?

We have been passive and accommodating through so many years of your insults and delays that you think the way things used to be is normal. When the good-natured, spiritual-singing boys and girls rise up against the white man and demand to be treated like he is, you are bewildered. All we want is what you want, no less and no more."

Frederick Douglass had gone through the same evolu- tion 100 years earlier and ended with the stark conclusion, "Power concedes nothing without a struggle."

The story starts way back, during the time after the Civil War when at least three white groups were contending for control of the four million freed slaves. Abolitionists and other northern liberals wanted to educate the freedmen to "level all vestiges of the past," as Horace Mann Bond put it. If they had pre- vailed, American history would have been far different. But of course they could not prevail. Arrayed against them were southern conservatives and southern liberals, each with their own ideas, and they were strengthened by the uninterested, apathetic majority in the North.

American blacks are in the position of a colonial population. They have been compelled to adopt the cultural standards and norms of their rulers in order to make any advancement whatever. But American blacks have been denied the option of a true colonized popu- lation; they have no true culture of their own to oppose to that of their exploiters, because theirs was systematically de- stroyed by the slave masters. They are uniquely vulnerable; it has been for them a choice of conform or die.

There is no longer any alternative for black Americans but to unite and fight together for their own advancement as a group. Everything else has been tried, and it has failed.

I think often of what Malcolm once said about freedom: "You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you'll do anything to get your freedom. Then you'll get it. It's the only way you'll get it."

Racism keeps people who are being managed from finding out the truth through contact with each other.

From the beginning I felt that there were only two ways to create change for black people in this country — either politically or by open armed revolution. Malcolm defined it succinctly — the ballot or the bullet. Since I believe that human life is uniquely valuable and important, for me the choice had to be the creative use of the ballot. I still believe I was right. I hope America never succeeds in changing my mind.

the main reason the war on poverty was lost was a failing that was built into it. The antipoverty programs were designed by white middle-class intellectuals who had no experience of being poor, despised, and discriminated against. They looked at the condition of the poor and made their diagnosis: lack of opportunity. All the other problems of the have-nots in our society — hunger, ignorance, crime, disease — were seen to be caused by the fact that when poor people tried to reach out for socially acceptable goals, they found their aspirations blocked.

Most of the poor were poor because they were labeled niggers or greasers or hillbillies or canucks or spics. They belonged to despised, powerless groups. There was no way the antipoverty strategists could see the importance of this factor. They knew about it theoretically, but they had not been there themselves. They didn't know where it was at. If they had gotten together with their "clients" in the poor communities from the start, things might have been different.

If people started to get together to help themselves, with the resources of the federal government to help them, who would need the ward politicians, the district leaders, the clubhouse lawyers, the courthouse gang? So the local politi- cians' response was to take charge wherever they could, and usually they could; they made sure the representatives of the poor were hand-picked, middle-class, and "responsible" lead- ers who had more in common with the existing power struc- tures than with the truly deprived. It did not take long for the mass of the poor to catch on that they were being defrauded once again.

The history of the war on poverty shows, among other things, that people are learning to rebel against government that imposes on them policies that they had no hand in form- ing.

Finally he went all the way with his March 1970 statement on policy, appointing himself the guardian of the "neighborhood school," a code phrase that no segre- gationist could fail to catch and admire. He proclaimed that the federal government would not require busing beyond "normal geographic zones" and made it clear that Washing- ton would have nothing whatsoever to say about de facto segregation. The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference between open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind that works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politi- cians. What the President said was that, as long as a locality can manage to keep its black, brown, and poor citizens jammed into filthy slums by conspiracy, rather than by stat- ute, it is fine with him and no one in Washington will lose any sleep.

The first two years of his administration made him a symbol to me, and I think to nearly every black American. He represents nearly every one of the deep-seated and tragic flaws of this society, as they appear to us. He does not care for his black fellow citizens; he does not even see them until he is forced to, and then deals with them grudgingly. He is able to disregard the misery of poor Americans of every color in order to squander our resources on a foreign military adventure in which this nation has no vital interest.

prejudice against women is still acceptable because it is invisible. Few men can be persuaded to believe that it exists.

More than half the population of the United States is female, but women occupy only 2 per- cent of the managerial positions. They have not yet even reached the level of tokenism. No woman has ever sat on the Supreme Court, or the AFL-CIO council. There have been only two women who have held cabinet rank, and at present there are none. Only two women now hold ambassadorial rank in the diplomatic corps. In Congress, there are one woman senator and ten representatives. Considering that there are about 3.5 million more women in the United States than men, this is outrageous.

Here are a recent year's figures from the Labor Department: white males earned an average of $7,179 a year, black males $4,508, white women $4,142, and black women $2,934. Measured in uncontestable dol- lars and cents, which is worse — race prejudice or antifemin- ism? White women are at an economic disadvantage even compared to black men, and black women are nowhere on the earnings scale.

The best defense against this slander is the same one blacks have found. While they were ashamed of their color, it was an albatross hanging around their necks. They freed them- selves from that dead weight by picking up their blackness and holding it out proudly for all the world to see. They found their own beauty and turned their former shame into their badge of honor. Women should perceive that the nega- tive attitudes they hold toward their own femaleness are the creation of an antifeminist society, just as the black shame at being black was the product of racism.

It is not female egotism to say that the future of mankind may very well be ours to determine. It is a fact.

the words of Women's Lib- eration activist Robin Morgan, "Women are not inherently passive or peaceful. We're not inherently anything but hu- man. And like every other oppressed people rising up today, we're out for our freedom by any means necessary."

"All forms of commerce between master and slave are tyranny," intoned Thomas Jef- ferson, who is rumored to have had several children by black women on his estate. If the story is true, the great democrat was a great hypocrite. Even if it is not true, it has verisimili- tude. It could be a perfect metaphor for the way our country was founded and grew, with lofty and pure words on its lips and the basest bigotry hidden in its heart.