Chisholm began exploring her candidacy in July 1971 and formally announced her presidential bid on January 25, 1972, in a Baptist church in her district in Brooklyn. There, she called for a “bloodless revolution” at the forthcoming Democratic nominating convention for the 1972 U.S. presidential election. Chisholm became the first African American to run for a major party’s nomination for President of the United States, making her also the first woman ever to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination (U.S. Senator Margaret Chase Smith having previously run for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination). In her presidential announcement, Chisholm described herself as representative of the people and offered a new articulation of American identity: “I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people and my presence before you symbolizes a new era in American political history.”
Her campaign was underfunded, only spending $300,000 in total. She also struggled to be regarded as a serious candidate instead of as a symbolic political figure; the Democratic political establishment ignored her, and her black male colleagues provided little support. She later said, “When I ran for the Congress, when I ran for president, I met more discrimination as a woman than for being black. Men are men.” In particular, she expressed frustration about the “black matriarch thing”, saying, “They think I am trying to take power from them. The black man must step forward, but that doesn’t mean the black woman must step back.” Her husband, however, was fully supportive of her candidacy and said, “I have no hang-ups about a woman running for president.” Security was also a concern, as, during the campaign, three confirmed threats were made against her life; Conrad Chisholm served as her bodyguard until U.S. Secret Service protection was given to her in May 1972.
Chisholm skipped the initial March 7 New Hampshire contest, instead focusing on the March 14 Florida primary, which she thought would be receptive due to its “blacks, youth, and a strong women’s movement”. But, due to organizational difficulties and Congressional responsibilities, she only made two campaign trips there and ended with 3.5 percent of the vote for a seventh-place finish. Chisholm had difficulties gaining ballot access, but campaigned or received votes in primaries in fourteen states. Her largest number of votes came in the June 6 California primary, where she received 157,435 votes for 4.4 percent and a fourth-place finish, while her best percentage in a competitive primary came in the May 6 North Carolina contest, where she got 7.5 percent for a third-place finish. Overall, she won 28 delegates during the primaries process itself. Chisholm’s base of support was ethnically diverse and included the National Organization for Women. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem attempted to run as Chisholm delegates in New York. Altogether, during the primary season, she received 430,703 votes, which was 2.7 percent of the total of nearly 16 million cast and represented seventh place among the Democratic contenders. In June, Chisholm became the first woman to appear in a United States presidential debate.
At the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida, there were still efforts taking place by the campaign of former Vice President Hubert Humphrey to stop the nomination of Senator George McGovern for president. After that failed and McGovern’s nomination was assured, as a symbolic gesture, Humphrey released his black delegates to Chisholm. This, combined with defections from disenchanted delegates from other candidates, as well as the delegates that she had won in the primaries, gave her a total of 152 first-ballot votes for the presidential nomination during the July 12 roll call. (Her precise total was 151.95.) Her largest support overall came from Ohio, with 23 delegates (slightly more than half of them white), even though she had not been on the ballot in the May 2 primary there. Her total gave her fourth place in the roll-call tally, behind McGovern’s winning total of 1,728 delegates. Chisholm said that she ran for office “in spite of hopeless odds … to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo”.
It is sometimes stated that Chisholm won a primary in 1972, or won three states overall, with New Jersey, Louisiana and Mississippi being so identified. None of these fit the usual definition of winning a plurality of the contested popular vote or delegate allocations at the time of a state primary, caucus or state convention. In the June 6 New Jersey primary, there was a complex ballot that featured both a delegate-selection vote and a non-binding, non-delegate-producing “beauty contest” presidential preference vote. In the delegate-selection vote, Democratic front-runner McGovern defeated his main rival at that point, Humphrey, and won the large share of available delegates. Of the Democratic candidates, only Chisholm and former North Carolina governor Terry Sanford were on the statewide preference ballot. Sanford had withdrawn from the contest three weeks earlier. In that non-binding preference tally, which the Associated Press described as “meaningless”, Chisholm received the majority of votes: 51,433, which was 66.9 percent. During the actual balloting at the national convention, Chisholm received votes from only 4 of New Jersey’s 109 delegates, with 89 going to McGovern.
In the May 13 Louisiana caucuses, there was a battle between forces of McGovern and Alabama governor George Wallace; nearly all of the delegates chosen were those who identified as uncommitted, many of them black. Leading up to the convention, McGovern was thought to control 20 of Louisiana’s 44 delegates, with most of the rest uncommitted. During the actual roll call at the national convention, Louisiana passed at first, then cast 18.5 of its 44 votes for Chisholm, with the next-best finishers being McGovern and Senator Henry M. Jackson with 10.25 each. As one delegate explained, “Our strategy was to give Shirley our votes for sentimental reasons on the first ballot. However, if our votes would have made the difference, we would have gone with McGovern.” In Mississippi, there were two rival party factions that each selected delegates at their own state conventions and caucuses: “regulars”, representing the mostly white state Democratic Party, and “loyalists”, representing many blacks and white liberals. Each slate professed to be largely uncommitted, but the regulars were thought to favor Wallace and the loyalists McGovern. By the time of the national convention, the loyalists were seated following a credentials challenge, and their delegates were characterized as mostly supporting McGovern, with some support for Humphrey. During the convention, some McGovern delegates became angry about what they saw as statements from McGovern that backed away from his commitment to end U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, and cast protest votes for Chisholm as a result. During the actual balloting, Mississippi went in the first half of the roll call, and cast 12 of its 25 votes for Chisholm, with McGovern coming next with 10 votes.
During the campaign, the German filmmaker Peter Lilienthal shot the documentary film Shirley Chisholm for President for the German television channel ZDF.
In February 2005, Shirley Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed, a documentary film, aired on U.S. public television. It chronicled Chisholm’s 1972 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. It was directed and produced by independent African-American filmmaker Shola Lynch. The film was featured at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004. On April 9, 2006, the film was announced as a winner of a Peabody Award.
In 2014, the first biography of Chisholm for an adult audience was published, Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change, by Brooklyn College history professor Barbara Winslow, who was also the founder and first director of the Shirley Chisholm Project. Until then, only several juvenile biographies had appeared.
Chisholm’s speech “For the Equal Rights Amendment”, given in 1970, is listed as number 91 in American Rhetoric’s Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century (listed by rank).
