Shirley Chisholm and the Color of the Twelfth Congressional District

Shirley Chisholm lives on in lore as the “Fighting Shirley Chisholm” of the 1972 presidential campaign, and the “Unbought and Unbossed” leader of her own writings. In 2010, New York assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries said this: “Shirley Chisholm blazed a trail from the streets of Brooklyn in 1972 to the White House in 2008.”

Yet in order to understand Chisholm’s distinctive brand of politics, her 1968 congressional victory is actually more instructive than her 1972 presidential campaign. In 1968, she built a diverse multi-racial coalition. It reflected the terrain of New York’s new 12^th Congressional District: a patchwork of races, ethnicities, and religions.

The district lines were redrawn early in 1968, just after Chisholm announced her candidacy for the United States Congress. In many scholarly works, the 12^th district is described as an area with a black voting majority. Moreover, residents perceived it that way at the time. It seemed fated that this district would elect an African American. But my study of the campaign reveals no such inevitability. In fact, among registered voters, whites and blacks were represented in roughly equal numbers. During the Democratic primary, Chisholm faced off against another African American: William C. Thompson. While they competed for the votes of African Americans in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Chisholm realized that the key to victory lay in the building of a multi-racial coalition.

She set out to win the votes of Italian Americans in Bushwick, Polish Americans in Greenpoint, and Puerto Ricans and Jews scattered throughout Williamsburg and Crown Heights. Chisholm showed the ability to speak many different languages – and to straddle multiple political worlds.

To explore her first congressional campaign is to understand Chisholm – and her slice of Brooklyn – in a new light.