Only U.S. denizens of a certain age and/or students of American presidential politics or African American history are likely to have heard of Shirley Chisholm. She was the first African American woman to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (from her district in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn) and, in 1972, the first to run for president, as she took on George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, Bob Muskie and others for the Democratic Party nomination. The Good Fight is her memoir of that presidential campaign, written very soon after the election and republished last year on the occasion of the campaign's 50th anniversary.

Chisholm was (she died in 2005) a very clear and effective writer, and this memoir makes very interesting reading. She provides a survey of the important issues of the day, the Vietnam War, race relations, women's rights and Nixon's dismantling of the social programs put in place by Lyndon Johnson foremost among them. She describes her decision to run, essentially, as she tells it. due to calls from calls among the constituencies she represented who wanted a relevant alternative to the many white men, conservative and liberal both, to work and to vote for. She writes of the resentment and resistance she encountered by male black political leaders, very few of whom actually endorsed her campaign, although some who didn't actually endorse her gave tacit support. And she writes of her frustration with white liberal politicians who talked a good game but were not often to be found when action (or important congressional votes) were needed.

Her campaign was mostly a cash-starved effort, and she only entered a handful of Democratic primaries. The idea was to garner enough delegate votes to keep any of the "major" candidates from being able to win the nomination on the first vote at the convention, enabling her to be able to bargain for important concessions in the official party platform before releasing her delegates to the candidate who stood to win the nomination. In some states, supporters who wanted to campaign for her begged Chisholm to allow them to enter her in a primary she wouldn't otherwise have signed up for. This happened in the California primary. Chisholm explained to these supporters that she wouldn't be able to campaign in the state or even provide financial help due to lack of funds. The California volunteers would be entirely on their own. Those supporters pushed on, anyway.

Another important sign of those times was the fact that Chisholm's most prominent supporters came from the ranks of young African Americans and mostly middle class white women's rights activists, who often couldn't communicate well with each other and in many states developed fairly acute enmity for each other. The women were often arrogant, unable to identify with the problems of African Americans and looking down at working class people in general, and the African American men brought their gender bias to the office. But as Chisholm writes in her conclusion, "it is important that I never made the rights of women or of blacks a primary theme of my campaign but insisted on making my role that of a potential voice for all the out-groups, those included. . . . Long unmet needs for housing, health care, pensions on which the aged can live decently, effective schools everywhere, including the poorest neighborhoods--all these and more cannot be neglected any longer, I kept saying." In the end, she gained support for her candidacy from across the gender/race spectrum. But she did not come close to picking up enough delegate votes to force more robust policies into the Democratic Party platform.

Chisholm has a lot to say about the rather arrogant, paternalistic campaigns run by McGovern and Humphrey, in which blacks and women were represented only by token figures, but in which effective black and female voices were very much excluded. And yet, post-election, she also says, "Men like George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey are going to be badly needed in the U.S. Senate in the coming years. Our public life would be greatly enhanced if we had dozens more George McGoverns, men who, to quote George Orwell, are 'generously angry--a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.'"

The memoir's only drawback, if such it is, is that it provides Chisholm's global perspective of events, but precious little detail about personality and life experience, either Chisholm's or any of the other players. Her husband barely gets a mention, for example, other than that we're told he fully supports her efforts. None of the other figures become people; they're just names attached to actions and attitudes. That makes for a brisk and readable political memoir--obviously what Chisholm was shooting for--but we never really get the idea we're seeing Shirley Chisholm the person rather than the politician and activist. Fifty years on, though, as far as posterity's concerned, maybe that's the most important thing, anyway.

At any rate, I found The Good Fight to be a fascinating memoir about a fascinating watershed time in U.S. history. Chisholm was clear-eyed about the damage Nixon had already done and what further damage would be done during his next term (aborted though it turned out to be). In terms of civil rights, the Nixon-era backlash was bad enough. The Regan-era backlash "war on crime" was many degrees worse, and the potential that Chisholm saw for the future at that pivotal moment seems tragically to have foundered on the rocks. ( )