# The 1972 Florida Primary *A Biography of Shirley Chisholm* — Legendary Biographies No. 056 - **Subject:** Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm - **Written by:** Theodore Pemberton - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / American Politics - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 203 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 203 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-070-6) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-214-4) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/056-the-1972-florida-primary.html ## About this book January 25, 1972, the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn. Shirley Chisholm, forty-seven, the first Black woman ever elected to the United States Congress, announces her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. "I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud," she tells the room. "I am not the candidate of the women's movement of this country, although I am a woman, and I am equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people of America." She runs through the Florida primary, wins 152 delegates, and arrives at the Miami convention with a floor minority she leverages into the platform's first formal mention of women's rights. Theodore Pemberton's biography opens earlier — in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Shirley Anita St. Hill was born to Barbadian and Guyanese immigrant parents in 1924 — and follows the arc through the Barbados school years, Brooklyn College and Columbia, the Childcare Director apprenticeship, the 1968 election to the Twelfth Congressional District, the seven House terms, the 1972 presidential campaign, the long retirement at Spelman College, and the death in Ormond Beach, Florida, in 2005 at eighty. What emerges is a portrait of the unbought-and-unbossed Brooklyn congresswoman whose 1972 campaign opened the door her successors still walk through and whose name the country took thirty-five years to put on a postage stamp. ## Contents 1. The Grandmother 2. Brooklyn Child 3. Brooklyn College 4. The Education of an Educator 5. The Machine and Its Discontents 6. Albany 7. The Race for Congress 8. The House 9. Unbought and Unbossed 10. The Decision to Run 11. The Mechanics of Exclusion 12. The Wallace Visit 13. Miami Beach 14. The Long Middle 15. The Pedagogy of Power 16. What She Built 17. The Body and the Spirit 18. The Legacy 19. The Film ## Questions **Who is The 1972 Florida Primary about?** Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The 1972 Florida Primary — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,010 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 64,000 words, 19 chapters, 203 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Theodore Pemberton is a Boston-based biographer whose books on American presidents and political operatives have been shortlisted three times for the Lukas Prize. He writes biography that takes campaign finance and procedural history seriously, focusing on the mechanics of political power. His early publications, including The Playbook and The Chief, established his reputation for meticulous archival research. His subsequent works, such as The Founder, Blexit, and The Bunker Hours, continued to examine the inner workings of political machines. With The 1972 Florida Primary, The Bletchley Park Hut, and The Mar-a-Lago Storeroom, he turned his attention to specific, high-stakes environments that shaped national policy and intelligence operations. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where he spends his time teaching writing workshops and rowing on the Charles River.