Lawmaker has a suggestion for adding more Black women to Capitol art
Rosa Parks sits alone among the hundreds of artworks dotting the Capitol. The civil rights icon is the only Black woman currently memorialized in a fulllength statue.
Boosting representation is an “immediate need,” according to Rep. Yvette D. Clarke, who wants to see another trailblazer installed at the Capitol – Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress.
“She showed millions of Black children what was possible. She showed me what was possible. For this and countless other reasons, Congress should honor Chisholm’s life and living legacy,” Clarke said in a statement this week, after introducing a bill that would direct the Joint Committee on the Library to obtain a statue of Chisholm for placement in the building.
The New York Democrat has been down this road before. She worked with then-sen. Kamala Harris during the last Congress on a similar push, but the legislation never made it to the floor.
With both chambers now controlled by Democrats, and after a summer of protests and activism across the country, there’s renewed energy to venerate some of the people of color who paved the way for others. Clarke believes the time is right to celebrate the woman who earned the nickname “Fighting Shirley.”
“Honoring Shirley
Chisholm with a statue in the halls of the Capitol does more than memorialize her life. It proves to the millions of Black girls and women in this country that if they achieve, if they strive for greatness, if they better their country and this world, they too may be honored eternally in the United
States Capitol,” Clarke said in the statement. Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock introduced a companion bill in the Senate.
Other lawmakers have floated bills in the past to award Chisholm a Congressional Gold Medal, though none have been successful. President Barack Obama posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
Chisholm was elected to the House in 1968 to represent New York’s
12th District, which then encompassed some of the same area that Clarke represents today. She cofounded the Congressional Black Caucus and in
1972 became the first
Black woman and the first Caribbean American woman to seek the nomination for president from a major political party.
She died on New Year’s Day of 2005 and was laid to rest in Buffalo’s Forest Lawn Cemetery. The vault is inscribed with her motto: “unbought and unbossed.”
Chisholm’s influence is still seen today by women in Congress. Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee cites her as a key inspiration, and Harris honored Chisholm when she launched her own presidential bid on nearly the same day 47 years later, with campaign materials that had similar colors and fonts.
The House art collection already includes a striking depiction of the former educator who said she had “no intention of just sitting quietly and observing,” in the form of a portrait painted by artist Kadir Nelson.
Chisholm stares right at the viewer with her back to the Capitol on a cloudless blue day. She’s wearing a blue patterned coat and a doubled-up string of pearls around her neck. Her arms are crossed and her right index finger is raised as if she’s making a point.
The U.S. Postal Service commemorated Chisholm by placing her on a stamp in 2014, making her the 37th issued in its Black Heritage Series.
A full-length statue in the halls of Congress would be doubly meaningful, Clarke said, since so few Black people have been honored that way.
A bronze of Frederick
Douglass is the only fulllength statue of a Black man in the building, according to the Architect of the Capitol, while Parks is the only Black woman. Some National Guardsmen were seen taking photos with the Parks statue when they were called to protect the Capitol in the aftermath of its storming by a pro-trump mob on Jan. 6.
Two more Black women are expected to be added to the National Statuary Hall Collection, which consists of 100 historical figures, with each of the 50 states selecting a pair. Florida recently commissioned a statue of Mary Mcleod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women, to replace obscure Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith. And in December, Virginia’s statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was removed. He is expected to be replaced with a statue of Barbara Johns, who as a 16-year-old in 1951 led her Farmville, Virginia, classmates in a student strike protesting unequal education.