A statue of Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to serve in the United States House of Representatives, is coming to Brooklyn in 2020. It will be located at the Parkside entrance of Prospect Park. The location was selected because Chisholm was a life-long Brooklynite and represented the Central Brooklyn in Congress. In 1972, Shirley Chisholm became the first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination and the first black woman to seek the presidential nomination of either of the major political parties. Chisholm was also a co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus. In 2015, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded Chisholm the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
An artist who will design the statue should be selected in 2019.
In Congress, Shirley Chisholm advocated for the Equal Rights Amendment and the 1972 Title IX amendment that ended discrimination against women in federally funded education and sports programs.
A 2004 documentary about her presidential campaign, “Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed,” by filmmaker Shola Lynch, chronicled Chisholm's presidential campaign and included interviews with Chisholm where she reflected on her life in public office. Chisholm died in 2005 at the age of eighty. In 2015, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
The decision to honor Shirley Chisholm followed yearlong contentious public debate and hearings on whether to remove New York City monuments and rename streets that recognize individuals associated with slavery and other “symbols of hate.” The decision was made to remove the statue of James Marion Sims from Central Park and the public was asked to nominate new individuals, especially women, to celebrate. Sims was a 19th century gynecologist who experimented on enslaved African women in the South without using anesthesia or antiseptics.
Shirley Chisholm was born in Brooklyn in 1924. Her parents were a factory laborer from Guyana and a seamstress from Barbados. Chisholm earned a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College in 1946 and a Master’s degree in early childhood education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1952. Before she entered politics and was elected to the New York State Assembly, Chisholm was a nursery school teacher and consultant to New York City's Division of Day Care. While in the Assembly, Chisholm helped secure unemployment insurance for domestic workers.
In her Assembly and Congressional campaigns, Chisholm was known for her campaign slogan "This is Fighting Shirley Chisholm" and for taking her campaigns to the streets and the people. She would ride through neighborhoods on a sound truck and make multiple stops where she would speak to her constituents in both English and Spanish.
New York City currently has over 1,000 monuments and 145 statues honor individual men. Only five honor women, Joan of Arc, Golda Meir, Gertrude Stein, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harriet Tubman. Shirley Chisholm will be number six. In Manhattan’s Central park there are 23 historical male statues, but the only females represented in the park are fictional characters, nymphs, and angels. A non-profit group is lobbying the city to place a monument to suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony at the West 77th Street entrance.
Shirley Chisholm’s life will soon be the subject of an Amazon Studies bio-epic starring and produced by Academy Award winning actress Viola Davis.
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