Unbought And Unbossed by Shirley Chisholm

And scrawled all over it was ‘go home n*****.’ That's how the campaign began.”Īlthough dismissed at the time, Shirley Chisholm was a presidential candidate of considerable substance and experience. And I go to pick up my bags and the brochures and bumper stickers from the luggage carousel. On the other was one brochure, ‘Chisholm for President.’ I took a plane to Raleigh, North Carolina. Coming from the printer they were in boxes … but on the outside of the box you had one bumper sticker. And I had to wait until we received the bumper stickers and brochures that we could hand out.

“And my first trip was to North Carolina to go to some colleges to try to organize students. I’m raring to go,” says Gottlieb, who is now an attorney in New York City. Comedian Redd Foxx famously quipped, “I sure as hell prefer Raquel Welch to Shirley Chisholm.”

The very idea of a Black woman in politics who made no apologies made her something of a punchline. She didn't downplay her feminism-she flaunted it. One badge showed her face surrounded by the circle of an astrological Venus symbol. Her posters and buttons left no doubt about who she was. The slogan appeared on Chisholm’s campaign posters, one of which resides in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “Her slogan was 'unbought and unbossed.' She was really unbossed.” “She was unafraid of anybody,” says Gottlieb. Robert Gottlieb was first an intern in Chisholm’s congressional office and later hired as the student coordinator for her presidential campaign, which would come to rely heavily on the support of college students.

Already the first Black woman to be elected to the United States Congress in 1968, Chisholm made her ambitious attempt to win the White House decades before her country was ready for her, garnering just 152 delegate votes at the Democratic National Convention. I am not the candidate of the woman's movement of this country, although I am a woman and I am equally proud of that.”īefore Carol Moseley Braun, before Barack Obama, before Hillary Clinton, Shirley Chisholm was both the first woman and the first African American to run for the nomination of a major party for president of the United States. “I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. It was 1972, and Shirley Chisholm was announcing her historic run for the White House, challenging fellow Democrats George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie, Henry M. Her head was barely visible above the forest of microphones. A Black woman's bespectacled face appeared in front of a podium.

Unbought And Unbossed by Shirley Chisholm