Chisholm Town

There are ten monuments dedicated to Black people in New York City, and only one is dedicated to a Black woman: Alison Saar’s monument to Harriet Tubman in Harlem, completed in 2008. The Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, where Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth confer around a table, doesn’t count. The original proposal only featured Anthony and Stanton. Truth was added only after public outcry in 2020 over the whitewashed suffragist history. If monuments were our only public records, you’d think mermaids had more influence on American history than Black women.

Shirley Chisholm is the rare Black female figure who takes up public space. Her political trajectory in the 1960s and ’70s was unprecedented: a schoolteacher born in Bed-Stuy and raised in Brownsville with Bajan and Guyanese roots; an educator turned civic leader turned elected official. The first Black woman elected to Congress, the first Black woman to run for President on a major party ticket, the first woman to run for the Democratic nomination for President, and a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

All those firsts — combined with the sartorial sharpness of a dressmaker’s daughter unafraid of prints — made Chisholm hyper visible in the halls of Congress and on the presidential campaign trail. Photographed at a Meet the Press interview in 1972 with Democratic presidential hopefuls, like so many other images of her, she disrupts the sameness: four white men in suits of varying shades of blue and gray, and her in the foreground, draped in a navy cape with white piping along the edges, gold jewelry, and red nails. She has the look of someone well acquainted with other people’s doubt and condescension but who remains undeterred. Her politics also set her apart. She was laser-focused on policies that supported people living at the margins: expanding the federal minimum wage and unemployment benefits to include domestic workers, establishing SNAP and WIC. She even championed a bill for a nationwide network of free and low-cost 24-hour childcare centers. If we were living in Chisholm’s childcare utopia, we might have avoided adding “urban family exodus” to the doom-loop dictionary.

In the 20 years since her passing, it seems like everyone has finally caught up to Fighting Shirley Chisholm. Her name shows up in all kinds of civic spaces: a state office building, a post office, a street, a middle school campus, a daycare center, a terrace in a city park, a state park. Her archives at her alma mater, Brooklyn College, have become a repository not only for her records but also for women’s activism in Brooklyn over the past 80 years. An exhibit dedicated to her life is currently up at the Museum of the City of New York. Soon, that commemorative landscape will expand even further. A recreation center in East Flatbush bearing her name, one of the largest investments in social infrastructure in Central Brooklyn in decades, will open this year. A monument in Flatbush, the first built in honor of a Black woman in Brooklyn, is set to be installed in early 2026. Chisholm’s presence in public space is all the more outsize given the dearth of monuments dedicated to Black women, not just in New York City but nationwide.

Mary McLeod Bethune was the first Black person and the first woman to have a monument erected in Washington, D.C., in 1974. She stands twelve feet tall, sculpted in rough-cast bronze that almost looks like clay. She gazes into the future, holding a scroll in one hand and a cane in the other. The base of the monument, a stone pedestal, is inscribed with excerpts of her last will and testament: “I leave you love. I leave you hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another. I leave you a thirst for education. I leave you a respect for the use of power. I leave you faith. I leave you racial dignity. I leave you a desire to live harmoniously with your fellow men. I leave you a responsibility to our young people.” Two children stand by her side, ready to receive her legacy.

There was immediate mobilization to erect a memorial in Bethune’s honor following her death in 1955. It took 14 years of fundraising and advocacy from the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), which she founded, to ensure that her impact as a pioneering educator, civil rights leader, presidential advisor, and the first Black woman to lead a federal agency was publicly preserved. One of the most vocal advocates for the monument was Shirley Chisholm. The newly elected congresswoman from New York championed a bill to erect the monument and co-chaired the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Committee.

At a time when Black communities across the country were facing police violence and struggling to access quality housing and jobs, some asked what good a monument to a fallen Black leader was. How did Black memorialization serve Black advancement? In a letter to the NCNW in 1970, Chisholm defended the monument against its critics: “The Memorial will serve as a manifesto that Black Americans have not only earned the right to the necessities of daily living, but to their heritage as well.” Her assertion that monuments can be manifestos of Black life feels all the more salient if we think of them as projections from the past into the future, above-ground time capsules. The closest thing we have to time travel, they let us receive messages from our ancestors about what mattered to them and how they wanted to be remembered.

When it is completed next year, Chisholm’s monument (the first of five in the works to honor women of color across New York City) will be the central node in a network of projects celebrating her life. Following her death in 2005, commemorations began to trace the contours of her congressional district, which stretched from Fort Greene to Midwood, capturing most of Brooklyn’s Black Belt. A long, low brick building with rounded corners topped with barbed wire in Bed-Stuy bears her name in thin metal letters, easy to miss beneath the bold United States Post Office sign.

A 13-story state office building in Fort Greene, home to congressional offices and state housing and community development services, once looked like a typical century-old government building with decades of deferred maintenance. A recent facade renovation has added some civic polish. Chisholm’s name looks like it’s been there forever, in large, gold, Federal-style letters that sit above a cast-stone entrance with gold doors. A small black plaque with gold-embossed lettering and a raised portrait of Chisholm features one of her quotes: “I am, was, and always will be a catalyst for change.”

A section of Park Place in Crown Heights near her family home is co-named Shirley Chisholm Place. A paved circular path in Brower Park, where she once taught classes, is now called Shirley Chisholm Circle, marked by one of the Parks Department’s signature green signs. A nearby boulder holds another plaque, echoing many of the oft-repeated accolades but featuring a different quote.

Beyond gestures of dedication to a prominent civic leader, the symbolism of many of these projects was coterminous with Barack Obama’s election. Electing the first Black president was a moment to reflect on the multi-decade project of shifting public imagination about what a president could look like — a project that began with Chisholm.

A second wave of commemoration began in 2019, 50 years after Chisholm became the first Black woman to serve in Congress. The idea for a monument to Chisholm had been floated around, but the pandemic combined with a change in mayoral administration would shift the timeline. A long-delayed city project became the site of one of the largest investments in community space in her part of Brooklyn. The Shirley Chisholm Recreation Center at Nostrand Playground is set to be completed by the end of the year. In 2012, then-Council member Jumaane Williams pitched the project to Mayor Bloomberg, who funded a feasibility study. Mayor de Blasio later committed $40 million. But it was not until 2020, amid calls to defund the police, that $141 million reallocated from the NYPD budget kicked the project into gear. Once home to the park’s synthetic turf ball field, the three-story, 62,000-square-foot space will feature a competition-sized pool, basketball courts, workout rooms, a media lab, spaces for teenagers to hang out, a teaching kitchen, and a flexible community space for programming and events. Her name will be inscribed in metal letters on the building’s brick facade.

In conversation with Weston Walker, Design Principal and the Partner in Charge of Studio Gang’s New York Office, he described the project referencing an iconic Chisholm quote: “It’s literally the place where you could bring a folding chair. It’s the place where you come and sit and you carve out space for yourself.” The design team was inspired by Shirley Chisholm’s aesthetic sensibilities for the interior color palette: marigold yellow, a color she used in her campaign materials, appears throughout. Circular windows are a nod to her campaign badges: Chisholm: Aim High. Shirley Chisholm: Unbought & Unbossed. If I Was 18, I’d Vote for Chisholm. Chisholm Now. Take the Chisholm Trail to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The masonry facade responds to the brick buildings that surround it, including Flatbush Gardens, one of the largest housing complexes in Brooklyn. In recent years, it has become a prime example of slumlord tactics and the aftereffects of the pandemic. By 2022, nearly a third of the 2,500 rent-stabilized households in the complex were facing eviction. At the same time, the landlord, Clipper Realty, had accumulated nearly 3,000 housing violations. In 2023, the city reached an agreement with the company: a $191 million, 40-year tax abatement in exchange for renovations and long-term affordability of the units.

A state initiative funding housing and community development in Central Brooklyn helped bring to life the largest commemorative space dedicated to Chisholm: a 407-acre state park along Jamaica Bay. Although the park had been in development for decades, the state program, Vital Brooklyn, provided the final push. Chisholm’s face is one of the first things you’ll see biking into the park along the Jamaica Bay Greenway. Painted on a storage shed, her mural is larger than life, surrounded by butterflies and flowers, her gaze directed toward the city. On the other side of the building is another one of her quotes: “Service is the rent we pay for the privilege of living on this earth.” Fifty years after her time in Congress, her constituents and their descendants are still in need of that kind of service.

The monument represents Chisholm the person. Someone who moved through the world audaciously, unafraid to take up space or make space. Maya Angelou said of modesty: “I have no modesty. Modesty is dangerous, it’s a learned affectation.” If Chisholm had moved through the world modestly, there would have been no path for her to elected office. She might have succumbed to the sexist critiques leveled at her during her political career, about her appearance, her accent, her lisp, the way she moved through spaces as a political aberration.

Olalekan Jeyifous, who designed the monument with Amanda Williams, explained, “We wanted to be larger than life, because we felt she was larger than life.” The monument will stand 32 feet tall at the southern tip of Prospect Park where Parkside and Ocean Avenue intersect, the decidedly Caribbean side of the park. Today the entrance is not much more than a pair of overgrown pergolas set in a plaza with missing cobblestones. The installation early next year will be paired with a plaza renovation with new trees and planters.

The monument is wrapped by two semicircle inscription elements that, when viewed together, give the structure the appearance of a kinetic sundial. One half is composed of stone pavers representing the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. A gold bronze plaque represents New York’s 12th Congressional District, the seat Chisholm held for fourteen years. Another well-known Chisholm quote follows the edge of the opposite half of the circle, carved in stone. The structure itself consists of two intersecting steel profiles. The primary face, visible from the park entrance, shows Chisholm’s silhouette over the Capitol dome, painted tropical green and edged in gold-patinated bronze. As you move around the installation, the silhouettes merge and separate, revealing the Capitol and her profile interwoven with flora from Brooklyn and Barbados, both rendered in shimmering bronze. Parts of the monument’s base are open — a door left ajar, inviting us in. Her size makes her feel less like a structure to stand before and more like one to find comfort under. “She’s a beacon, bringing you to this space,” says Amanda Williams.

Chisholm experienced multiphasic commemoration that spanned her life and death. She even presided over a park dedication in her name while still serving in Congress. I wonder if, in her advocacy for Bethune’s bronze figure, she was driven by a need for permanence, a guarantee that future generations would not only know someone like Bethune and Chisholm existed but also be reminded of the work that’s left to be done.

The Washington Post interviewed teenagers hanging out in D.C.’s Lincoln Park the night before the unveiling of Bethune’s monument. One interviewee shared mixed feelings about the statue, pointing out that, due to rising housing costs, “Black people are being pushed out of the neighborhood every day.” Before Bethune’s arrival, Lincoln Park was run down; community members and the NCNW successfully advocated for its renovation as part of the monument’s unveiling. Even before the statue was installed, it became a social totem for the broader issues Black residents in D.C. were already facing, police violence, displacement via urban renewal and housing costs, and a lack of investment and maintenance of public services.

The movement to celebrate historical figures beyond just white men is now going head-to-head with the current Trump administration. The “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, released in March, explicitly criticizes efforts to confront the selective histories represented by bronze men on horseback. It even directs the Secretary of the Interior to reinstate any monuments or memorials that were removed in 2020, as municipalities across the country faced pressure to reexamine which histories were being glorified in public space. We’re living through a time-traveling battle, waged with stone, bronze, and steel.

When an administration can erase a website, report, dataset, or archive in an instant, creating a physical declaration in public space feels like the closest thing to permanence. Your eyes cannot deceive you when you gaze upon Bethune — or when a future version of yourself gazes upon Chisholm as you make your way to Prospect Park. And perhaps in that moment, you’ve received their call to action: reminded of the future they imagined for us, and what it will take to get there.