Screenshot of Jeanne (she/her) left, and Zinga Fraser (she/her), in dialog on the Brooklyn Public Library’s Heart Brooklyn Historical past (BPL-CBH) on Dec. 12.
Photograph by Milette Millington
On Dec. 12, the Brooklyn Public Library’s Heart for Brooklyn Historical past (BPL-CBH) hosted a hybrid dialog with Dr. Zinga Fraser about her newly edited ebook, “Shirley Chisholm: In Her Personal Phrases” (College of California Press, 2024).
The ebook description states: “This long-overdue remedy of her work establishes Chisholm as an unparalleled public mental and Black feminist each in her time and now. The ebook not solely contextualizes the Civil Rights and Black Energy period; it additionally offers timeless insights on points which might be exceedingly related in our present second.” It additionally introduces a brand new technology to one of the crucial impactful proponents of democracy in America.
Fraser is an assistant professor of Africana Research and Ladies’s and Gender Research at Brooklyn Faculty and the director of the Shirley Chisholm Mission on Brooklyn Ladies’s Activism. She began the dialog by sharing why writing the ebook took so lengthy.
“I believe as a result of girls have been seen as activists, and even historians have framed them as activists and backbones. They’re the central half, however I by no means considered them as theorists, as intellectuals participating, writing issues down, making a concerted effort. We take into consideration Anna Julia Cooper or others however not those that are engaged in political exercise or those that are writers,” she mentioned.
Chisholm (1924-2005) was a public mental and Black feminist who was the primary Black girl elected to Congress in 1968. In 1972, she was the primary Black candidate and girl on a significant get together ticket to run for President of the US.
In accordance with Fraser, Chisholm wasn’t essentially a author like Toni Morrison or a poet like Sonia Sanchez or Nikki Giovanni, who simply handed away. As a result of she engaged in and arranged political activism, she was seen as somebody who did the work however not essentially a thinker.
For instance, Fraser shared that Chisholm had a progressive understanding of rehabilitation and crime earlier than we even had a time period or framing of group policing.
Fraser defined that she was “very a lot an advocate, to say that people who find themselves policing folks’s communities ought to seem like them or ought to really stay in that group and have interaction with them. “
Chisholm’s speeches and writings on schooling, racism, girls’s rights, and civil rights additional proved her unparalleled function as a path-breaker and pioneer, difficult the established order with a forceful imaginative and prescient of a simply and equal democracy.
Those that have an interest can discover all the main points to buy the ebook right here: https://www.ucpress.edu/books/shirley-chisholm-in-her-own-words/hardcover
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