When Kamala Harris takes the stage Thursday night and becomes the first woman of color to accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, she will be exploring new territory — something she has done in every elected office she has held since winning the race for San Francisco district attorney in 2003.
Though Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton precede the vice president in this ceiling-breaking pantheon, neither of them experienced the double jeopardy of being black and a woman. In those and many other ways, Harris has more in common with Shirley Chisholm.
Chisholm was the first black woman to serve in Congress. She was elected in 1968 and had the courage and audacity to run for president just four years later, joining white candidates in the crowded Democratic primary of 1972. Her black colleagues in Congress and in the civil rights movement were furious because they thought the honor of becoming the first black presidential candidate should go to a man. Even the National Women’s Political Caucus, which Chisholm co-founded, did not support her because its leaders were trying to gain political clout on behalf of women’s issues and knew Chisholm could not win.
Chisholm’s campaign slogan, “No Purchase, No Command,” perfectly described her candidacy as an outsider. She toured the country speaking to large crowds of young, multiracial voters who embraced her message of gender and racial equality, abortion rights, poverty alleviation, and ending the Vietnam War. Running a campaign on a shoestring budget by hundreds of young volunteers, Chisholm saw her mission as engaging alienated youth (the voting age had just been lowered from 21 to 18) in the political system.
When she met Barbara Lee, then a single mother on welfare and the president of the Black Student Union at Mills College, Chisholm tried to force her to register to vote. “I said, ‘Not me. That’s bourgeois. I’m a revolutionary, so I’m not going to…’” Lee recalls. But Chisholm was persuasive, and Lee joined her campaign, launching the political life that led to her becoming a 13-term congresswoman from Oakland.
The parallels between today’s political environment and the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s that Chisholm faced are striking. These include a new civil rights movement (Black Lives Matter) and a new women’s rights movement (#MeToo), as well as widespread student protests over a foreign war, this time not in Vietnam but in Israel and Gaza.
Of course, the most shocking part of the past roaring back into the present is the 2022 Supreme Court decision stripping away 50 years of federal abortion rights. The urgency women now feel to regain their lost freedom echoes the popular uprising of the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
And just as Chisholm worked to engage young people, Harris is energizing a TikTok generation that is notoriously distrustful of political institutions. Gen Z had been as apathetic to voting for Donald Trump or Joe Biden as Barbara Lee’s generation had been to voting for Richard Nixon or George McGovern.
In 1969, when the 535 members of Congress included only 10 blacks and 11 women, Chisholm was treated with disdain bordering on disgust by many of her colleagues on Capitol Hill. Her campaign posters were desecrated with racial slurs, and Nixon’s dirty tricksters tried to tarnish her reputation in a secret campaign they shamelessly code-named “Operation COAL.”
Once again, the past is roaring into the present as the Trump campaign brings its racist strategy to life. His campaign's racist attacks on Harris began with the mispronunciation of her first name and then accused her of having recently decided to “turn black.” The three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices who were part of the majority that overturned Roe v. Wade, Coupled with JD Vance's general denigration of women (especially women who don't have children), this appears to be the tip of the iceberg of anti-women elements in the Republican ticket's Christian nationalist-inspired strategy.
But along with this open misogyny and racism, the Trump-Vance ticket is also playing a sexist card (with Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock included) and, as a result, this election is already predicted to have the largest gender gap in the history of presidential elections.
In 1972, the National Women’s Caucus, led by Congresswoman Bella Abzug and Ms. magazine founder Gloria Steinem, endorsed McGovern over Chisholm because Chisholm had no chance of winning the nomination, and McGovern agreed to include abortion rights in the party platform. But McGovern ultimately changed her position and did not support the controversial position. Chisholm, who had asked delegates to vote their conscience and support her, felt vindicated.
Feminist and civil rights activist Florynce Kennedy attributed McGovern's betrayal to the fact that the women's group gave up their support too easily, without reaching an airtight agreement. As she put it mischievously: “Honey, if you like fucking for a dime, you can't complain because somebody else is getting a fur coat.”
Chisholm won just 2.7% of the popular vote and 152 delegates at the Democratic convention in Miami Beach. Her candidacy may not have been politically practical, but it was a colossal success in exposing the entrenched culture of racism and sexism in American politics.
Chisholm recalled the glory of her time at the DNC, later writing: “When I arrived at the convention hall, I was illuminated by the noise. It was a wonderful moment for me, to see the way all the delegates welcomed me at the convention… Because I had felt that someday, a black person or a woman should run for president of the United States, and now I was a catalyst for change.”
Kamala Harris has the winds of history in her favor. The groundwork laid by Shirley Chisholm and her generation of second-wave feminists could be strong enough for this country to elect a woman of color as president.
Clara Bingham is a former White House correspondent for Newsweek. Her latest book is “The Movement: How Women's Liberation Transformed America, 1963–1973.“
