While Shirley Chisholm winning her bid for Congress may be old news now, when she ran in 1968 there was nothing inevitable about it. Chisholm had been a schoolteacher and administrator, who had recently been elected to the New York State Assembly in 1964, a historic first for a Black woman from Brooklyn.

Born and bred in Bed-Stuy, the heart of the 12th Congressional District, Chisholm knew her constituents. As a working woman of color, she was one of them. Wearing her Sunday best and smart cat-eyeglasses, in perfect diction with a slight lisp and a bit of West Indian lilt, she staked out her positions as a “candidate for the people” – by which she meant all the people in her multi-ethnic district.

But her general election opponent, James Farmer, had a national profile, as well as a clean-cut look and a booming tenor’s voice. He came to Brooklyn as a member of the Congress on Racial Equality (C.O.R.E), who had worked closely with Martin Luther King, Jr., and organized the 1961 Freedom Rides. Even running as an Independent Republican, and disavowing President Nixon, from the mainstream media point of view it seemed like no contest for Farmer to win the Brooklyn district, at least as indicated by the scant coverage.

After all, Chisholm was a woman, and in 1968 it would be hard enough to get a credit card in her own name, let alone run for public office. As a married, middle-aged Black woman, it would be perceived as impossible. But Fighting Shirley Chisholm clearly saw it another way.

Here is the wild audio of her victory celebration and speech, which starts around two minutes in:

The 58 reels in the Shirley Chisholm 1968 Congressional Campaign audio collection tells her story in the month leading up to the election. Recorded from in the field with all its audio imperfections, Chisholm’s voice, perspective and conviction is clear and unedited.

While the Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided the framework and opportunity for a candidate like Chisholm, her fighting spirit, strategic mind, and tremendous wit took her across the line with 66% of the vote for the win. In an election year that saw more than 200 Black candidates in state and local elections across the country, she joined two newly elected and 6 returning Congressmen as the first Black Congresswoman of the United States.

The audio is the only known and unabridged account of Chisholm’s historic campaign and victory.

For more, please reach out to the Moving Image & Recorded Sound Division in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.

Shola Lynch oversees the Schomburg Center’s collections of motion picture films, video recordings, music, and spoken-arts recordings, which document the experiences of people of African descent. She is also an accomplished filmmaker focusing on African American history. Her works include the Peabody Award-winning documentary Chisholm ’72 - Unbought & Unbossed. Lynch holds an MA in American History and Public History Management from the University of California, Riverside, and an MA in Journalism from Columbia University.

As part of our month-long Dear NYC series, we're looking at New York City gems hidden away at the New York Public Library. The NYPL’s four research centers offer the public access to over 55 million items, including rare books, manuscripts, letters, diaries, photographs, prints, maps, ephemera, and more. Integral to these robust collections is the Library’s extensive material related to New York City, and as NY works to come together, cope, heal and recover from the 2020 pandemic, economic uncertainty, and the many issues that divide us, it is important to look at that history and remember: New York is resilient. New York is strong. New York has seen its share of hard times. And, as always, with Patience and Fortitude (the names given to the Library’s beloved lions in 1933 by Mayor LaGuardia for the virtues New Yorkers needed to get through the Great Depression) we will get through it, together.