There was something so plain and yet so defiant about her. Studious and yet a little jazzy, especially in front of those Brooklyn church ladies.
Shirley Chisholm, the former congresswoman who died New Year's Day in Florida at age 80, came along at a moment in the 1960s when there was a bubbling symmetry between the women's liberation movement and the civil rights movement. She was holding two candles in the wind.
At church podiums in Brooklyn, she'd talk about babies eating paint they had peeled from the walls, and she'd talk about malnourished schoolchildren, and she'd raise her fist, and her big mound of cloudlike hair would bob, and she would start to crying, tears rolling from beneath those beatnik-era glasses. She would turn her back to the audience -- as if she couldn't stand her own tears -- and then turn around to face the folk in the pews, and they'd be stomping.
"I used to say to her, 'You should go into drama,' " recalls Edolphus Towns, a Democratic congressman from Brooklyn. "She could drop tears at any time."
Chisholm began her working life in 1950s Brooklyn. She was the director of a day-care center and worked as an educational consultant for the city. The tots had parents and she befriended them and got herself elected to the New York State Assembly in 1964. She was headed to Albany, the same place that launched the national political careers of Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Dewey, Franklin D. Roosevelt and many others.
In the '60s, the talk in New York of black political figures focused on names such as Basil Patterson, Percy Sutton, Charlie Rangel. They were young lions who belonged to Harlem political clubs. (There was also Adam Clayton Powell, the once-powerful congressman who had crawled back to Congress in 1969 after an expulsion and scandalous headlines. But his day was now gone.)
But Patterson and Sutton and Rangel suddenly had to yank their heads and look across the bridge, to Brooklyn.
Shirley who?
"Shirley came out of Brooklyn, and that was one of the roughest political arenas you can come out of -- even today," says Rep. Rangel (D), who knew Chisholm for decades. "For her to succeed, she had to be a little strange -- and certainly extraordinary."
In addition to being a woman and from Brooklyn, Chisholm was also -- unlike Powell, Sutton, Rangel and Patterson -- dark-skinned. Given the history of skin color, she had an extra ladder to climb, and did so with relish, carrying herself with the insouciance of the world's most attractive woman.
So there she'd be, needing a ride to Albany and getting herself over to Harlem so that Sutton, who was also in the assembly, could pick her up.
"Shirley would meet us on the corner of 125th and Seventh -- now Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard -- and ride with us to Albany,'' says Sutton. "We did that for two years."
Sutton noted something about Chisholm on those rides. She was hungry for debate: "Even if she agreed with you, she'd want to debate you!"
With the '60s drawing to a close, Chisholm was swimming in the waters of history. "She had the imagination," says Rangel, "of being first -- and tenacious."
