The 1972 Florida Primary

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.