Shirley Chisholm would have turned 102 on Nov. 30. She died in 2005, long before last Tuesday, but she would have known exactly what she was witnessing.
On Nov. 3, Georgia elected Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta, as the first Black woman ever elected governor of any state. In the U.S. Virgin Islands, Stacey Plaskett, the territory’s delegate in Congress since 2015, became its first woman governor and the first Black woman elected to lead any U.S. territory. In New York, former City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams won the lieutenant governorship on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s ticket, becoming the first Black woman to hold that office.
Plus, Illinois sent Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton to the U.S. Senate, where she will join Sens. Angela Alsobrooks (D) of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D) of Delaware. Thus, for the first time in the nation’s history, three Black women will serve in the Senate at once.
Stratton’s victory also honors former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, who in 1992 became the first Black woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate. Stratton will be only the second Black woman to represent Illinois there, and just the sixth to serve in the chamber.
None of this happened overnight. It was planted.
Chisholm broke the ground in 1968, when she won a Brooklyn House seat and became the first Black woman elected to Congress. Her slogan, “Unbought and Unbossed,” announced that she owed her place to voters, not party bosses. Four years later, she ran for president. She was the first Black candidate to seek a major party’s nomination and the first woman to compete for the Democratic one. She did not expect to win. She ran anyway, because someone had to show that the door could be knocked on.
The advice most often attributed to her still frames this moment: if they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris carried that chair further than anyone. When she launched her first presidential campaign in 2019, her red-and-yellow branding paid open tribute to Chisholm’s 1972 run. In 2024, she became the first Black woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket. She fell short of the White House, but she made the sight of a Black woman at the top of the ballot ordinary rather than unthinkable. That shift matters for every candidate who comes after her.
In Georgia, Stacey Abrams planted the seeds. Her 2018 and 2022 campaigns for governor did not end in victory, but the voter-registration machinery she built through the New Georgia Project and Fair Fight helped remake the state’s electorate. Hundreds of thousands of Georgians were registered, organized, and persuaded that their ballots could change who governs them. This year marked the third straight cycle in which a Black woman led Georgia’s Democratic ticket. Bottoms walked into the governor’s mansion through a door Abrams spent a decade prying open.
Plaskett’s path is its own tribute to Chisholm. For more than a decade she spoke in Washington for Americans who have a delegate in Congress but no full vote on the House floor and no vote for president. She was a standing reminder that the fight over who gets represented is not finished. Now she will govern them.
Chisholm said she wanted to be remembered as a catalyst for change. Last Tuesday, that change arrived in Georgia, in the Virgin Islands, in New York and in Illinois.
The work now is making sure these firsts are not the last, and that the folding chairs keep coming.
