Madame Chisolm’s celebrated win on election night, Nov. 5, 1968, still resonates. Over the years, her victory is often cited as inspiration for women running for public office.
In 1968, Chisholm defeated James Farmer for New York’s 14th Congressional District. She was a New York State assemblywoman, elected in 1964 after leaving behind a career in education, first as a nursery school teacher and later a consultant to New York City’s Division of Day Care. Farmer, a black man and civil rights leader, ran as a Republican. The reapportioned 12th Congressional District was largely made up of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant community and a few other parts of the borough. Bed-Stuy’s residents were mostly African-American and Puerto Rican. It was also Chisholm’s home.
Chisholm labeled Farmer “an outsider” during the campaign, because he lived in Manhattan. Among her tactics, she spoke in Spanish to Spanish speakers, a language she had developed fluency in as a schoolteacher. She took her campaign to the streets, literally, riding on a truck with a loudspeaker. Making multiple stops, she regularly kicked off her remarks by saying, “This is Fighting Shirley Chisholm.”
The contest between two Black candidates garnered little media attention outside Brooklyn. In Susan Brownmiller’s 1970 biography of Chisholm, she described the candidate as distraught over the lack of coverage. Chisholm was concerned that only The Amsterdam News, a black newspaper, seemed interested in covering her near the end of the campaign.
But when the final votes were tallied, voters chose Chisholm by better than a 2-to-1 margin over Farmer.