From Shirley Chisholm and Barbara Jordan to Toni Morrison and the Women of Selma, a Historic Election Confronts America’s 239-Year Legacy of Exclusion
By Bankole Thompson
PuLSE Ideas & Commentary
For 239 years, there was a chair in the American imagination that generations of Black women were told they could never occupy.
They were considered worthy of building the nation, but not governing it. Their labor sustained American institutions, but their voices were excluded from the rooms where power was exercised.
They raised generations, organized movements, confronted segregation and challenged the conscience of a republic that proclaimed equality while denying them its privileges.
On Tuesday night, November 3, Keisha Lance Bottoms claimed that chair.
And she claimed it in Georgia, where she previously served and the mayor of Atlanta.
The state where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born. Where the machinery of Jim Crow sought to make Black political power unimaginable. Where generations risked their lives demanding recognition as full citizens.
Bottoms’ election as America’s first Black woman governor-elect is more than a political milestone. It is a moment that invites the nation to confront the historical distance between its democratic promises and the people it once excluded.
To appreciate that distance, we must return to Philadelphia in 1787.
When the framers assembled to construct the American republic, the men debating liberty occupied every chair while millions remained outside the boundaries of political belonging.
Enslaved Black Americans had no seat. Women had no seat. Native Americans had no seat.
The architecture of American democracy was constructed without the participation of millions whose lives it would govern.
In August of this year, I confronted this contradiction when I delivered the eulogy at the funeral service at the Empowerment Church in Southfield, Michigan, for the 98-year-old legendary civil rights pioneer and barrier-breaking physician Dr. William G. Anderson, who led the historic Albany Movement in Georgia and worked alongside Dr. King.
I titled that eulogy “William G. Anderson and the Empty Chair at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.”
The empty chair represented those whose humanity was excluded from the founding conversation. Anderson belonged to a generation determined to challenge that exclusion.
Now, in the state where he confronted Jim Crow, a Black woman has been elected to the highest executive office.
But Bottoms did not arrive at this historic moment alone. She stands within an extraordinary inheritance of Black women who refused to accept the boundaries America placed around their possibilities.
Shirley Chisholm challenged the political establishment when she became the first Black woman elected to Congress and later sought the presidency in 1972. Her candidacy challenged the assumption that executive power belonged exclusively to men.
Barbara Jordan, the formidable Texas congresswoman, brought extraordinary constitutional authority to the Watergate hearings, demonstrating that the interpretation and defense of America’s founding principles were not the exclusive inheritance of those who wrote them.
Toni Morrison, through her literary genius, confronted another form of exclusion: the erasure of Black humanity from the nation’s cultural imagination. Her work insisted that Black lives, memories and experiences belonged at the center of American literature.
Chisholm challenged the doors of political power. Jordan challenged the boundaries of constitutional authority. Morrison challenged the limits of America’s moral imagination.
Each, in her own way, confronted the empty chair. And so did the women of Selma.
My mentor, Rev. Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr., helped organize the voting rights struggle in Selma, Alabama, the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, which paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And he did so alongside ordinary people whose courage transformed American democracy.
Among them were Black women whose organizing, sacrifice and leadership sustained the movement, often without the recognition accorded its most prominent figures.
LaFayette understood that the ballot was not merely an instrument of participation. It was a means of transforming the institutions that determined people’s lives.
I had the privilege of learning from him, and his nomination led to my service on the National Board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization Dr. King founded and led as its first president.
Lafayette’s legacy reinforced an enduring truth: The Civil Rights Movement was never simply about who occupied power. It was about whom power served.
Fannie Lou Hamer understood that truth when she challenged the exclusion of Black voters in Mississippi.
Rosa Parks understood it when she refused to surrender her seat in Montgomery.
And in Georgia, Stacey Abrams helped expand the political organizing infrastructure that contributed to the state’s changing electoral landscape and consequently paved the way for Bottoms to win the governorship.
These women were not waiting for history to recognize them. They were changing the conditions under which history would be written.
Yet Bottoms’ election must not become the final destination of that struggle because equity must mean more than rhetoric. Access must mean more than an open door. Inclusion must mean more than a ceremonial seat at the table.
These principles must translate into quality education, affordable health care, economic opportunity and the ability of families living in poverty to pursue lives of dignity.
For The PuLSE Institute, the national and independent anti-poverty and economic justice think tank Detroit, these are fundamental questions about the moral responsibilities of government.
A child born into poverty in rural Georgia deserves the same opportunity to flourish as one born into privilege in Atlanta.
Political representation is a historic achievement. Economic justice remains an enduring obligation.
As America commemorates its 250th anniversary, Bottoms’ election invites us to examine the unfinished promises of a republic whose founding ideals were larger than the political imagination of many of its founders.
The women who challenged that exclusion did not struggle merely to be remembered.
They struggled to transform the meaning of Black humanity.
Anderson understood that struggle. LaFayette helped organize it. Generations of Black women carried it into institutions that once denied them entry.
Bottoms now inherits the responsibilities of governing, where historic symbolism must confront the practical demands of public policy relating to issues of economic justice and poverty.
I return to the question at the heart of Anderson’s eulogy.
Who gets to sit?
Who remains outside?
And whose humanity is diminished when the institutions exercising power fail to recognize those they serve?
The empty chair of 1787 has acquired new meaning.
But the ultimate triumph of American democracy will not be measured by who finally occupies the chair. It will be measured by how many people who were once excluded are finally given a place at the table.
That is the inheritance of generations of Black women. That is the unfinished promise of America.
Bankole Thompson is a nationally acclaimed journalist, author and public intellectual whose work examines the intersection of democracy, civil rights, economic justice and moral leadership. He is a twice-a-week opinion columnist at The Detroit News, founder of The PuLSE Institute, and a former National Board Member of the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
