MEMBERS OF THE SEALE FAMILY who trace their roots to Christ Church in Barbados are likely to be in a celebratory mood on Tuesday.
That’s when United States President Barack Obama will do something the Seales and Barbadians probably never expected to happen.
On Tuesday, Obama will award America’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to one of their descendants Shirley Chisholm and 16 other recipients, who in Obama’s words were “public servants who helped us meet defining challenges of our time” and who “have made our union more perfect.”
In 1968, Chisholm became the first black woman elected to the United States House of Representatives in Washington. Four years later, she wrote another chapter in American history when she sought the presidential nomination of a major political party, the first black person to take that plunge.
She won 152 delegates to the Democratic Party’s nominating convention, the first woman to achieve that feat.
She didn’t win but made her mark. It is readily acknowledged today that Chisholm’s run paved the way for blacks and women, including Obama and former Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton to enter the presidential fray of a major party.
“I ran for the presidency in order to crack a little more of the ice which in recent years has congealed to nearly immobilise our political system and demoralise people,” she explained in her book, entitled The Good Fight published in 1973. “I ran for the presidency, despite the hopeless odds, to demonstrate sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.”
Chisholm was born in Brooklyn in 1924 to West Indian immigrant parents, Ruby Seale, a Bajan seamstress who married Christopher St Hill, a factory worker from the then British Guiana. They had four children and when Shirley was three years old, her mother sent her to Barbados to live with her maternal grandmother, Emaline Seale. They believed Barbados would provide the child with a much better education than American schools.
Shirley remained in Barbados until 1934 and she returned with an abiding interest in education and an ability to write and speak with distinction in a Bajan accent which remained with her throughout her life.
“Years later I would know what an important gift my parents had given me by seeing to it that I had my early education in the strict traditional British-style schools in Barbados,” wrote Chisholm in her 1970 autobiography, Unbought and Unbossed. “If I speak and write easily now, that early education (in Barbados) is the main reason.”
That passion for education was evident throughout her life, including her years at Brooklyn College where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1946 and at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College which awarded her a master’s degree in education in 1952. She married Conrad Chisholm, a Jamaican immigrant in 1949.
Education and community activism were her abiding interests. She became a consultant in the New York City education system and was considered an authority on early childhood education and welfare. It was education and day care centre operations that got her into politics. She volunteered to work in a white dominated political club in Brooklyn in the 1960s and soon she was elected to the New York State Assembly and later the State Senate.
When a new Congressional seat was created to give Blacks a place in Washington, Chisholm won the seat handily. The rest, as they say, is history.
Chisholm, whose face adorns a United States postal stamp, served in the House until 1983 when she decided to retire and later became a college political science professor.
She was nominated by President Bill Clinton to become United States Ambassador to Jamaica but declined the offer due to ill health.
She died in 2005.
Tony Best is the Nation’s North American correspondent. Email [email protected]
