ANALYZING PUBLIC SPEAKING AND STYLE

Analyzing Public Speaking and Style

Analyzing Public Speaking and Style

Long before Jesse Jackson, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, Shirley Chisholm launched a campaign for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, we rarely mention her efforts when we look at the history of U.S. presidential politics in the last forty years (Frederick, 2012). It would seem easy to forget how Chisholm blazed the trail for the likes Jackson, Clinton, and Obama after Clinton's and Obama's 2008 nomination battle. But the sexism that Hillary Clinton endured and the racism that Obama faced in 2008 arose from a longer context of racism and sexism structuring the outcomes of U.S. party and presidential politics. Chisholm stood as the first to confront the closed nature of national (and black) politics. Defending her campaign to the broader Democratic Party would seem par for the course; yet, Chisholm also battled the established black male leadership in quest to secure the nomination. In doing so, however, “Fighting” Shirley Chisholm, as she called herself, utilized various political styles and strategies seen in later candidates like Jackson, Clinton, and Obama (Chisholm, 1973).

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was born in Brooklyn, New York on November 30, 1924 to immigrant parents—her mother from Barbados and father from British Guiana. Trained as an educator, Chisholm involved herself in politics as a young adult. She worked for the Assembly District Democratic Club and the Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League during the 1940s and 50s. She ran for and won a seat in the New York State Assembly in 1964 and she eventually defeated civil rights leader James Farmer in 1968 to become the first black woman to serve in the U.S. Congress (Chisholm, 1972).

Eventually Chisholm found herself a member of two groundbreaking cohorts—the first, an emerging group of black feminists who came out of black female political circles and the civil rights and black power movements, and the second, a growing group of black elected officials who owed much of their success to the civil rights and black power movements and to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Chisholm was the first black feminist to serve in the U.S. Congress. She gave voice to black feminist Frances Beal's contention that black women experienced “double jeopardy”—sexism and racism. According to Beal and other black feminists racism and sexism structured black women's oppression, which then informed their thought, activism, and politics. Chisholm remarked about how her subject position could both influence her political outlook while yet testing her relationship with black and feminist social movements as well as the formal political system: “I am both black and a woman (“The short, unhappy life of black presidential politics, 1972”, 1967). That is a good vantage point from which to view at least two elements of what is becoming a social revolution; the American Black Revolution and the Women's Liberation Movement. But it is also a horrible disadvantage. It is a disadvantage because America…is both racist and anti-feminist.”

This was evident in her experience serving as a freshman congresswoman ...