Photos via AP/James Palmer/J. Scott Applewhite

Politics

The Long and Winding Road from Shirley Chisholm to Kamala Harris to. . .

The dean of Boston University’s law school says the New York congresswoman who dared to dream of the White House in 1972 may not have succeeded, but she planted the seed that led to Harris’ campaign, and will soon bring about America’s first woman president 

On Wednesday, November 6, 2024, I could fully sense Shirley Chisholm reaching down from heaven to comfort Vice President Kamala Harris. I even felt like I could hear that comfort in the vice president’s concession speech: “On the campaign, I would often say when we fight, we win. But here’s the thing, here’s the thing, sometimes the fight takes a while.” Few understood these words as much as Chisholm did. Slightly more than 50 years earlier, Chisholm had traveled down a similarly hard-fought and painful road, knowing that her push for the presidency, our nation’s path toward a female president, had only just begun. In 1972, Chisholm had made history herself when she became the first Black person ever to seek a presidential nomination from a major party. (Just four years earlier, Chisholm had altered history by becoming the first Black woman to be elected to serve in the US Congress.)

Unlike Vice President Harris, Congresswoman Chisholm made her run to be “Leader of the Free World” with no real hope for winning the Democratic nomination she so bravely sought. She knew she would face enormous obstacles and discrimination down that pathway—and she did. For example, except for the one debate that Chisholm successfully sued to participate in, she was completely blocked from speaking at any Democratic candidate debates. Additionally, Chisholm’s campaign was openly derided by those both within and outside her party. For instance, writer Norman Miller called her campaign “quixotic,” asserting that “few politicians, black or white, believe it.” Others accused Chisholm of playing “vaginal politics” (whatever that means), and Black comedian Redd Foxx joked, “I sure as hell prefer Raquel Welch to Shirley Chisholm.” Not surprisingly, Chisholm’s physical appearance, whether it was her boots or her diminutive stature, garnered unreasonable amounts of attention during her presidential campaign.

Overall, Chisholm struggled to find large numbers of “mainstream” supporters. Without meaningful financial support, she was forced to run her campaign on a shoestring budget, one that would leave her in debt for years. Compared to her male opponents, Chisholm raised only a miniscule amount of campaign funds. She had raised only $250,000 (with her expenses totaling $300,000), compared to the $12 million raised by Senator George McGovern (who ultimately secured the nomination), the $7 million brought in by Senator Edmund Muskie, the $4.7 million raised by Senator Hubert Humphrey, and the $1.5 million cultivated by Senator Henry Jackson. Even Alabama Governor George Wallace, who became infamous for standing before the University of Alabama “schoolhouse door” and declaring “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” managed to raise $2.4 million in campaign funding. Such numbers are a far cry from the billions or hundreds of millions that govern today’s politics, but they far overshadow the few hundreds of thousands that Chisholm was able to muster for her operation.

In the end, Chisholm managed to secure 10 percent of the 1,509 delegate votes needed to secure the nomination: 152 delegates. As the “Unbought and Unbossed” Chisholm explained in her book The Good Fight, she always knew that “her candidacy had no chance,” but she “ran because someone had to do it first.” And, she did so with remarkable grace, once showcasing her integrity and character when she, out of all the candidates, visited Alabama Governor George Wallace in the hospital after a failed assassination attempt on the campaign trail. It was a heartfelt move that Wallace’s daughter believed eventually helped push her father to apologize to Black people and ask for forgiveness. Explicating why she sought the high office, Chisholm continued in The Good Fight:

“What I said that night was that most people had thought I would never stand there, in that place, but there I was. All the odds had been against it, right up to the end. I never blamed anyone for doubting. The Presidency is for white males. No one was ready to take a black woman seriously as a candidate. It was not time yet for a black to run, let alone a woman, and certainly not for someone who was both. Someday…but not yet…

In this country everybody is supposed to be able to run for President, but that’s never been really true. I ran because most people think the country is not ready for a black candidate, not ready for a woman candidate. Someday…”

Because of Chisholm’s courage and trailblazing vision, that “someday” arrived for our nation on numerous occasions. With the Reverend Jesse Jackson, whose success in five primaries stunned his doubters in 1984 and 1988, and even inspired a young Barack Obama. With Geraldine Ferraro, who was the first woman to be nominated for vice president by a major political party, in 1984, alongside Democrat Walter Mondale. With Elizabeth Dole, a Republican woman who famously considered a run for the presidency in 2000. With Senators Hillary Clinton and Obama in 2008, ending with Obama’s election as president and his service for two full terms. And with then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton again, in 2016, in a defeat that stunned millions. Plus more.

But, for Black women in particular, that “someday” came more than 50 years after Chisholm, when Vice President Kamala Harris secured the Democratic presidential nomination in August of 2024. Of course, the path for Harris was not easy either. She encountered significant challenges, both then and during the actual presidential race.

At each turn, Harris faced intersectional sexism and racism. As the potentially first woman, first Black woman, and first South Asian woman president, she faced daily challenges about what she, as a woman, could say or wear without crumbling even the notion that a woman could be presidential. She had to distance herself from stereotypes about angry and aggressive Black women, she avoided even talking about the potential history she would be making, and she even faced criticism about how she laughed. Also, critics contested her candidacy in ways they never would do, or had done, against white men. Some voters even questioned whether a woman could effectively serve as president. Others criticized Harris for having no “biological children” or became overly focused on her classic good looks. Pundits like Megyn Kelly made the worst of age-old accusations about women, arguing that Harris had slept her way to the top. Many others, including President-elect Donald Trump, insinuated that she was an unqualified “DEI hire” and even questioned her Blackness.

But, just as Chisholm hoped all the way back in 1972, things were, in fact, better for Harris. After her unsuccessful presidential run, Chisholm explained her actions, declaring: 

“The next time a woman runs, or a black, a Jew or anyone from a group that the country is ‘not ready’ to elect to its highest office, I believe he or she will be taken seriously from the start. The door is not open yet, but it is ajar.”

Unlike for Chisholm, for presidential candidate Harris, the door was more than ajar; it was at least partially open (or only partially unobstructed, depending on what glass—half-full or half-empty—you tend to see). Harris herself had helped to pry open that door through a history of trailblazing, including her position as the vice president of the United States—as the first woman of any race to serve in that leadership role. Also, Harris was taken seriously from the very minute that President Biden dropped out of the race and announced his support for her; indeed, within just two days, she had garnered more than 50,000 volunteers, and she became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Critically, she experienced enormous triumphs in fundraising, accumulating more than a whopping $1.6 billion dollars to push for her election. Ultimately, instead of garnering only 10 percent of the delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination, Harris prodigiously and resoundingly locked down the nomination, obtaining 99 percent of the delegate and superdelegate vote and earning 2,200 more delegate votes than the 2,350 she needed to secure the nomination.

These days, it is these signs of progress that I find myself pointing to and sharing with my students, particularly my women students, as they take solace from me and my colleagues. These young women have voiced their sadness and frustration with the election results on November 5. They describe feeling aimless, and far too many have asked me, in their despondency, whether law school is even where they should be at this moment. They question whether this specific glass ceiling of the US presidency will ever be shattered. They loudly pronounce their anger, noting their disappointment with, and rage at, the voters whom they believed voted on charisma and brand rather than policies and qualifications.

Others have shared that they feel betrayed, particularly by their young, male counterparts, the majority of whom voted for President-elect Trump. In so doing, they have highlighted story after story of young women who died during miscarriages because doctors feared providing them with the necessary medical care. As one young female student declared to me the day after the election, with tears and pain in her eyes: “It hurts because the men our age basically told us they don’t care about us. They don’t care if we die!”

In the midst of such pain, it’s hard to imagine that my claims of meaningful progress over the years, my assurances that their male peers do, in fact, care about them, and my assertions of hope are not falling on deaf ears. Yet, I believe deeply in the words of BU alumnus Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Like Vice President Harris, I know that “the light of America’s promise will always burn bright as long as we never give up and as long as we keep fighting…[as long as we] fight for the ideals at the heart of our nation, the ideals that reflect America at our best.” Importantly, I know that, one day, the presidential glass ceiling will be broken. As Jotaka Eaddy, the founder of #WinWithBlackWomen (which ignited a fundraising and volunteer-raising movement at the start of Harris’ campaign), stated so eloquently during an interview at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, the path to this future milestone began centuries ago with so many women, particularly Black women, who will forever be unknown to us. Eaddy explained:

“[I] think about every single Black woman who is not in a history book….We are built on a legacy of women who paved the way for us, knowing that they would not see this day but they knew that we would be here for this day.” 

One of those women was Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, who knew that the road would be long and arduous and even unlikely to occur 55 years later in 2024. In 1969, when a journalist asked the then-first-year congresswoman whether she thought there would ever be a woman president of the United States, she readily remarked:

“Oh, yes. Yes, it’s coming. I believe this country will be saved by women and students, and if the women come together in spite of racial differences, class differences, economic differences and back a strong woman, I could see this happening in about 70 to 75 years.” 

Chisholm explained that men would need that much time to get acclimated to such a change. By my count, 70 to 75 years later falls between 2039 and 2044! Think about that. Congresswoman Chisholm believed she was igniting a change that would take three-quarters of a century; yet, she took that first leap.

Since November 6, 2024, I have been thinking a lot about Congresswoman Chisholm—thinking about her courage, her strength, her willingness to take that first step even before she could see the whole staircase, and her many words of wisdom. When asked about how she would like to be remembered in the future, Chisholm answered, “[A]s a Black woman who lived in the 20th century and who dared to be herself. I want to be remembered as a catalyst for change in America.” She definitely has been. So, I tell my students, “So, you can, too.”

Angela Onwuachi-Willig is dean and Ryan Roth Gallo Professor of Law at Boston University’s School of Law. She can be reached at aow@bu.edu.