A Path Where There Was None

In November 1968, Shirley Chisholm stood before supporters in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, having just won election to the United States Congress — the first Black woman ever to do so. She had defeated James Farmer, the nationally known civil rights leader and co-founder of CORE, to claim New York's 12th Congressional District seat. But the road to that podium had no map.

For years, Chisholm had worked as a nursery school teacher and later as a consultant for New York City's Bureau of Child Welfare. When she entered the New York State Assembly in 1965, colleagues questioned whether a woman — especially a Black woman from Brooklyn — could hold her own. When she announced her run for Congress three years later, even allies urged her to wait. The path she sought simply did not exist.

She ran anyway.

Isaiah 43:19 declares, "See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland."