How Shirley Chisholm & Fannie Lou Hamer Paved the Way for Kamala Harris

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” We are “Breaking with Convention.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we wrap up our five days here in Chicago covering the DNC.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: As we continue our coverage of the Democratic National Convention, we turn now to look at the legacy of Shirley Chisholm. In 1968, she became the first Black woman elected to Congress. Four years later, in 1972, she became the first woman and the first African American to seek a major-party nomination. On Thursday night, the Reverend Al Sharpton spoke at the convention and talked briefly about her.

REV. AL SHARPTON: Fifty-two years ago, I was one of the youth directors in her campaign for president. And 52 years after she was told to sit down, I know she’s watching us tonight as a Black woman stands up to accept the nomination for president of the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the Reverend Al Sharpton speaking at the Democratic National Convention this week. Shirley Chisholm now, speaking in 1972, when she declared her presidential candidacy.

REP. SHIRLEY CHISHOLM: I stand before you today as a candidate for the Democratic nomination for the presidency of the United States of America. 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, although I am a woman and I’m equally proud of that. I am not the candidate of any political bosses or fat cats or special interests. I stand here now without endorsements from many big-name politicians or celebrities or any other kind of prop. I do not intend to offer to you the tired and glib clichés which for too long have been accepted part of our political life. I am the candidate of the people of America.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Shirley Chisholm in 1972.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we’re still here with Barbara Ransby, historian, author and activist, professor of Black studies, gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Illinois Chicago. Barbara, your thoughts about the legacy of Shirley Chisholm?

BARBARA RANSBY: Yeah, I think about Shirley Chisholm a lot these days and that wonderful slogan of her campaign, “unbought and unbossed,” right? She was an independent thinker. She was fierce. She came out of Brooklyn, as you said, and came from West Indian parents. And she had a tough road, you know, just in terms of representation. We’re talking about before, being the first Black woman in Congress.

There’s a scene — Shola Lynch has a wonderful documentary film about Shirley Chisholm, and Shirley Chisholm recounts a Southern white senator who just couldn’t get over her sitting across from him and them having the same job. And he said, “You know, Ms. Chisholm, we both make 39-5.” And she said, “I’m gonna keep on making 39-5.” You know, so she forced her way into spaces that, you know, she was not wanted because of racism and sexism. But inside the Democratic Party, when she ran in 1972, she got mocked. She got a lot of opposition also from Black leaders, Black male leaders in particular.

And she was somebody, I think, who — I never met her, but, you know, from my study of Black women’s history and from people who did know her, she was a person of principle and resisting pragmatism that is so rampant in politics, right? So, you know, the Black Panther Party supported her, and she supported them. And they were saying, “Well, why are you supporting this group of armed folks?” And she said, “Well, because they’re fighting for poor Black people.” So, I think Shirley Chisholm really represents some of the best of folks working inside electoral politics, and wish we had more of that.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was the response to her running for president? How much pressure did she receive?

BARBARA RANSBY: She received a lot of pressure to not run for president and a lot of pushback from people who she felt — she thought initially would support her. Again, you know, her appearance was mocked. You know, she was sidelined in a lot of ways in larger Democratic and political and Black political discourse. So, she had a lot of pushback, being a woman and being Black.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, talk about her campaign. And ultimately, obviously, she did not get the nomination.

BARBARA RANSBY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: But when she decided to pull out? The pressure both in the overall community and also in the Black community, the response —

BARBARA RANSBY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — to Shirley Chisholm running for president?

BARBARA RANSBY: Yeah. I think she was very close to Ron Dellums at that time. And so, she went to the convention. She —

AMY GOODMAN: The congressman from California.

BARBARA RANSBY: The congressman, the late congressman from California, who was a very progressive force in Congress, was a young activist at that time. And she went to the convention and, you know, realized she didn’t have enough delegates and wouldn’t have enough delegates, and released her delegates in very tearful fashion, you know, but then continued to be a voice and to be a presence in Democratic Party circles, but not just in Democratic Party circles — this is 1972 — in movement circles, and, I think, talked about the need for a link between social movements and electoral politics, which is really what we have to remember in this moment.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about Fannie Lou Hamer. Shirley Chisholm comes after Fannie Lou Hamer —

BARBARA RANSBY: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — the daughter of Mississippi sharecroppers, who became involved in the civil rights movement when she volunteered to attempt to register to vote in 1962. By then, the 45-year-old mother lost her job, continuously risked her life over her civil rights activism. Despite this and a brutal beating, Hamer helped organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. We’re going to go right now to a clip of Fannie Lou Hamer — this is 1964 — addressing the Democratic National Convention, the rules committee, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

FANNIE LOU HAMER: If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off of the hook because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings in America?

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Fannie Lou Hamer. And, Professor Ransby, we want you to tell us about what she was attempting to do and what the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was, this alternate delegation. But at the time, Lyndon Johnson was so outraged that the cameras were focused —

BARBARA RANSBY: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: — on this Black woman at the Democratic National Convention, that I think he held an impromptu news conference to just pull the cameras away. But talk about this woman’s significance.

BARBARA RANSBY: Yeah. Well, when I saw — her significance and the significance of the MFDP, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which helped to organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party along with Ella Baker and others — when I saw the clip of the “uncommitted” delegation holding hands, coming in as outsiders inside, coming into the convention hall, asking for such a basic recognition of their dignity, I thought of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation. Of course, Black people had been disenfranchised in Mississippi and much of the South since Reconstruction.

Fannie Lou Hamer has a special place in my heart, not just as a historian, but she came from the same county in Mississippi, was born in the same year as my mother, who also worked as a sharecropper and a domestic worker. So, I think of Fannie Lou Hamer as very much of my mother’s generation, but also many common experiences.

So, Fannie Lou Hamer, you know, met young people organizing around voter registration, you know, in the ’60s. And they tell the story in SNCC of her looking down the road, and, you know, they’re coming in their coveralls with their clipboards trying to register Black voters. And she said she had waited all her life to see them come up that road, you know, because she was — her famous quote is “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” And so, Fannie Lou Hamer, in some ways, became the heart of SNCC and, of course, the heart of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

The thing I like to say about her, too, she’s often discussed in this sort of folksy way. She sang. She was a religious woman, very powerful voice, and told her story in a most compelling and powerful way, right? Which is why Lyndon Johnson didn’t want people to hear that story. But she also was an intellectual and a strategist. She was an internationalist. When MFDP and SNCC took a position against the war in Vietnam, she supported it. She traveled to Africa with young people in SNCC. So, somebody who had an expansive notion of freedom. You might say somebody growing up, you know, one of many children — I think it was 11 or 13 children in her family — she would have a very small or parochial view of the world — you know, “I want my freedom.” But, no, she said, “We have to get freedom for everybody.”

And so, when the MFDP went to Atlantic City in ’64, they came with this delegation that had held an alternative process of selecting electors, because they were excluded from the Mississippi Democratic Party. And they said, “Look, we represent — we’re a multiracial group. We represent the people of Mississippi. We want to be seated instead of this racist, segregationist, all-white delegation.” And the Democratic Party leaned into pragmatism over principle and said no. And then there was all the behind the scenes. And as I understand it, Kamala’s team offered the uncommitted folks a compromise, which would be a private meeting, which was so insulting. And similarly, the MFDP had been offered two seats instead of seating their whole delegation. And Fannie Lou Hamer and others said no. Her line was, you know, “We’ve all come a long way, and we’re all tired, and we’re not taking no two seats today.”

AMY GOODMAN: We’re doing an expanded two-hour broadcast of Democracy Now! today. In our second hour, we’ll be joined by an activist, a Black Muslim, who was involved in the pro-Palestinian issues of this convention, but also is the grandnephew of a man who worked very closely with Fannie Lou Hamer, so folks should tune in to our other hour of Democracy Now!