Friend of TAP Dayo Olopade has a fantastic series (Read part one, two, and three) over at The Root on black women and political power in the United States.
Olopade writes, "The real obstacles to elective office may be about less rights and more about belonging to the right club." Well, part of that is on us to install the standard bearers of black female political power into our cannon. Here are three women whose voices you should know:
"All this was on account of we want to register. To become first class citizens. ... Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America."
Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil-rights activist, addressing the 1964 Democratic National Committee as the vice chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The MFDP was seeking to be seated as a challenge to the all-white Mississippi Democratic Party.
"I look at the faces of the black youth of America. And they say, 'Chisholm, we know what you're going through. We know how rough and how tough. But we know you have the courage, the balls, the audacity to shake the system up, within the system."
Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman elected to Congress in 1969. She ran a groundbreaking campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. The video comprises clips from that campaign.
"What is different? What is special? I, Barbara Jordan, am a keynote speaker."
Rep. Barbara Jordan of Texas, was the first woman and African American keynote speaker at the 1976 Democratic National Convention.
--Phoebe Connelly
