Unbought and Unbossed

by Shirley Chisholm

“I want history to remember me not just as the first black woman to be elected to Congress, not as the first black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the United States, but as a black woman who lived in the 20th century and dared to be herself. I want to be remembered as a catalyst for change in America.”

“No one has the right to call himself a leader,” she declared, “unless he dares to lead.”

That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free.

Four years passed, barefoot, winterless years.

Political organizations are formed to keep the powerful in power. Their first rule is "Don't rock the boat."

Frederick Douglass said it best and shortest: "Power concedes nothing."

Another lesson I learned was that if you decide to operate on the basis of your conscience, rather than your political ad- vantage, you must be ready for the consequences and not complain when you suffer them.

It is incomprehensible to me, the fear that can affect men in political offices. It is shocking the way they submit to forces they know are wrong and fail to stand up for what they believe. Can their jobs be so important to them, their pres- tige, their power, their privileges so important that they will cooperate in the degradation of our society just to hang on to those jobs?

You can't argue with someone whose premises are completely different from yours, where there is not even an inch of common ground.

Every- one else is represented in Washington by a rich and powerful lobby, it seems. But there is no lobby for the people.

When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.

I just say, "No thanks. Invite me to speak at some other event and I'll try to make it then." I'm not going to take part in a sterile cere- mony by which hypocrites pretend to be cleansing themselves of the guilt of the racism they practice the rest of the time.

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.

"I'm a pragmatist. What is the sense of shooting, burning, killing? What will it bring? All they have to do is press a button in Washington and every black neighborhood will be surrounded with troops and bayonets. What are you going to do against the massive forces of the government? You can't fight this kind of a struggle with matchsticks. You are fourteen or fifteen percent of the population, with no real economic or political power. When you get through burning, won't you still have to go to the Man and ask for an apart- ment?"

"Who do you see suffering?" I ask them. "Black women and children. Are you able to give them an alternative by leading them into battle? You have no program because you have no power. Your program is rhetoric, and rhetoric never won a revolution yet. Until we begin to use our brainpower to rattle this structure, they're only going to laugh. They'll still be sitting around their conference tables, and you're going to have to knock on the door and say, 'We need a grant . . .' "

Before we make any change in the way this country functions, which is to benefit a small ruling minority, whites and blacks will have to learn that the true statement should be "Some whites control this country and much of the world, for their own purposes."

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.

This is hard, and especially hard for women, who are taught not to rebel from infancy, from the time they are first wrapped in pink blankets, the color of their caste.

Another disability is that women have been programmed to be dependent on men. They seldom have economic freedom enough to let them be free in more significant ways, at least until they become widows and most of their lives are behind them.

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.

In the end, anti-black, anti-female, and all forms of discrimination are equivalent to the same thing — anti-humanism.

“You can be part of the system without being wedded to it,” I say. “You can take part in it without believing that everything it does is right. I don’t measure America by its achievement, but by its potential.

My significance, I want to believe, is not that I am the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, but that I won public office without selling out to anyone.

There must be a new coalition of all Americans – black, white, red, yellow and brown, rich and poor – who are no longer willing to allow their rights as human beings to be infringed upon by anyone else, or any reason. We must join together to insist that this nation deliver on the promise it made, nearly 200 years ago, that every man be allowed to be a man. I feel an incredible urgency that we must do it now, if time has not run out, it is surely ominously short.