Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times/AP

Sylvia Garcia, from Bassett Street Elementary, speaks at a union rally in downtown Los Angeles, March 15, 2023. Soon afterward, a three-day strike by some 30,000 public school employees in Los Angeles led to a proposed 30% wage increase, among other boosts.

A wave of union activity is rippling across the United States, giving workers historic boosts in pay at a time when the cost of living is soaring. In this month alone:

• Public works employees in St. Paul, Minnesota, ratified a contract with a 9% raise in pay – and, based on seniority, up to 9% more.

• A New York union convinced a system of about 90 hospitals and nursing homes to reopen their contract with nearly 80,000 health care workers, winning annual raises of 7%, 6%, and 5% over the next three years.

• And in Los Angeles, a three-day strike by some 30,000 public school employees led to a proposed 30% wage increase from the school district, retroactive pay of $4,000-$8,000, and seven hours of guaranteed work a day for special education assistants. Workers will vote on the tentative contract next week. 

“It was just so inspiring and so powerful,” says Jannette Verbera, an L.A. special ed assistant and member of the union bargaining team who spoke to 45,000 people at a rally earlier this month. “When I was up onstage, I felt, like, so empowered by looking at everybody.”

The upsurge in union activity has many social and economic roots – from globalization to the pandemic to a generation of millennials and Gen Zers who saw their parents struggle during the Great Recession and for whom the American dream seems to be receding. While it’s not at all certain the current union activism will kick-start a rebound in the labor movement, it is clear that grassroots dissatisfaction is taking hold among a segment of low-paid workers, especially younger ones, and increasing support for collective labor action at levels not seen since the 1960s.

“It’s not just a cost of living crisis; it’s a crisis of living,” says Toby Higbie, professor of history and labor studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It’s linked to economics, but it’s a feeling of existential crisis. ... We no longer have that rosy view of America that [President Ronald] Reagan bequeathed on us.”

The dissatisfaction is palpable, especially for educated workers in relatively low-wage white-collar jobs.

“Most of us work two to three jobs,” says Ms. Verbera, who also serves as an office manager for a law firm just to get by. “So, a lot of us share the same sentiment, the same pain, the same frustration when it comes to disrespect and disregard in terms of not just wages, but other issues that we had like the lack of staffing, the lack of hours.”

“I’ve always had a side hustle,” says Francisco Peraza, who started working part time as a teaching assistant for Los Angeles County schools in 1993. He planned to get his teaching degree, but halfway through college, he got married, started a family, and quickly realized that he could not support it with his current wage. He left school to work more hours and to take on another part-time job.

“It was a sacrifice that we felt that we needed to make in order to just be able to survive in Los Angeles at that time,” Mr. Peraza says. “And then we had another child. And unfortunately, because of the stress of finances and the stress of me not being around my children because I had to work ... our marriage failed.” There were many factors, he adds, but financial disagreements was one of them.

After 30 years with the school district, Mr. Peraza’s pay has not quite doubled while inflation nationally has more than doubled. It’s especially not easy making ends meet in Los Angeles, with the seventh-highest cost of living among U.S. metropolitan areas and where, by one estimate, the average one-bedroom apartment rents for $2,400 a month. Another problem: School employees typically work only nine to 10 months a year.

Ken Lambert/The Seattle Times/AP

Members of labor unions protest outside Starbucks corporate headquarters, March 22, 2023, in Seattle. More than 300 Starbucks stores have unionized.

“I don’t pay 9 1/2 months’ rent,” Mr. Peraza says. “I don’t pay 9 1/2 months of groceries.”

Such challenges are not confined to workers at Los Angeles schools. “Not a day goes by when I don’t hear of people who can’t pay the rent,” says Professor Higbie. Most of his interactions are with campus staff and teaching assistants. “A lot of those people [the T.A.s] made $25,000, $30,000 a year,” he adds. “You can’t live on that here.”

Late last year, T.A.s, graduate researchers, and other academic employees at the University of California system, including UCLA, went on a monthslong strike and eventually won contracts that raised salaries up to 66%, secured a minimum salary of some $34,000, and improved child care and health care benefits.    

Now, academic workers at the rival California State University system, as well as the University of Michigan and Rutgers University, appear poised to strike over similar demands. The two unions bargaining at Rutgers include full-time faculty and part-time instructors. If they do walk out, it would be the first faculty strike in the institution’s 257-year history. 

SOURCE:

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

While much of the union action has taken place in schools and state and local government, the union movement also has notched headline-grabbing wins in the private sector, notably organizing more than 300 Starbucks stores and successfully organizing an Amazon warehouse in the New York borough of Staten Island.

The policy backdrop has also been shifting, with a labor-friendly administration in Washington and state or local laws – supported by organized labor – to boost minimum wages. But the new activity doesn’t represent a rebound for the labor movement, at least not yet.

“It’s easy to exaggerate it,” says Ruth Milkman, chair of the labor studies program at the City University of New York. “So far what has been going on has not been enough to really move the needle on the overall unionization rate in the United States.”

Indeed, the recent gains in organizing mostly have come in the public sector, where unions still represent 33% of the workforce, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the private sector, they represent only 6%. The overall union share of the workforce continued to decline last year to 10.1%, down from 10.3% in 2021 and far below the one-third representation that unions had in their heyday in the 1950s.

Also, while unions earned substantial raises last year, inflation ate away almost all those gains. So while last year’s average boost of 5.7% for the first year of contracts was the largest since 1990, according to Bloomberg Law, inflation in recent months has hit 40-year highs. In February, the urban consumer price index rose 6% year over year, nullifying many of the raises that union workers earned last year.

The economy has helped labor. “A pretty strong economy with a low unemployment rate with a lot of vacancies – that gives labor more bargaining power,” says Harry Katz, a professor of collective bargaining at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Ithaca, New York. But “that’s not a revolution. That’s a business cycle event.”

What is different this time, these experts say, is that unions have regained community support. That’s what happened in Los Angeles, where not only teachers were supportive of the staff workers’ strike, but also many parents, too. According to a Gallup survey last year, 71% of Americans approve of unions, the highest level since 1965.

“Parents were in the loop from the beginning,” says Conrado Guerrero, president of one of the local unions that led the picketing during the strike in Los Angeles. “And they understood that in order for their children to have a better experience in schools, they need us to be able to live here without having to work multiple jobs, without having to worry about, you know, ‘Where is my next meal going to come from?’”

In January, a euphoric Rahul Gandhi finished a monthslong march to “unite India” against the religious divisions sowed, he says, by his political opponent Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Now, the star of the Indian National Congress party stands expelled from Parliament, and possibly barred from India’s upcoming general election, in what political observers and rights groups are calling an assault on the integrity of Indian democracy.

A court in Gujarat, Mr. Modi’s home state, found Mr. Gandhi guilty of defamation last week for a 2019 speech that compared the prime minister to corrupt businessmen who shared his surname. “Why are all thieves called Modi?” Mr. Gandhi had said. The court granted Mr. Gandhi 30 days bail to appeal the verdict, but the lower house of Parliament – which is controlled by Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – expelled him from the legislature the next day. 

Mr. Gandhi’s disqualification “signifies the systematic, repetitive emasculation of democratic institutions by the ruling party,” Congress politician Abhishek Sanghvi said in a press conference. “It signifies the strangulation of democracy itself.”

While Mr. Gandhi is expected to file an appeal soon to reverse his conviction, political analysts say what has happened to him could be a boon in disguise – a rallying point for India’s opposition ahead of the 2024 elections. Members of Parliament from more than a dozen different parties wore black during parliamentary sessions in Delhi this week to protest Mr. Gandhi’s removal and the weakening of Indian democracy, while Congress supporters rallied against the BJP in demonstrations from Jaipur to Hyderabad.

Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters

Rahul Gandhi holds a news conference after he was expelled from India’s Parliament on Friday, at his party’s headquarter in New Delhi, India, March 25, 2023. The star of the Indian National Congress party may be barred from next year’s general election.

“The opposition needs to come together,” says Rasheed Kidwai, a political analyst at the Observer Research Foundation, a think tank in Delhi. “In order to make a dent in Mr. Modi’s popularity, [it] needs to have a narrative that says how the Indian democracy is coming under strain.” 

An unexpected opportunity?

Once a dominant force in Indian politics, the Congress party has struggled to rebuild itself since Mr. Modi came to power in 2014, and it only controls a handful of states today. In addition to the Congress, there are numerous regional parties and a handful of communist parties that make up India’s opposition. Their leaders seldom agree on policies or ideology, says Mr. Kidwai. “They’re fragmented and the vote gets divided,” which prevented the opposition from mounting a significant challenge to the ruling BJP in 2019, he explains.

Mr. Gandhi’s disqualification presents a rare opportunity for the Congress to unite India’s fractured opposition against the BJP, says Mr. Kidwai. Leaders of several opposition parties have already come out to support the convicted lawmaker. “Resist and defeat such authoritarian assaults,” a communist party leader tweeted. Others called his disqualification “vindictive and shameful,” and “the last nail in the coffin for constitutional freedoms in India.”

Mr. Gandhi’s expulsion from parliament has bolstered the opposition’s line of attack against the ruling party, more so, some argue, than his time in parliament did. 

“It’s politically more beneficial for Congress if he remains outside the parliament than if he gets reinstated,” says political commentator Ashok Swain, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden.

Congress leaders and supporters have been demonstrating in several cities this week. But with elections more than a year away, Mr. Kidwai says the Congress needs to generate a greater buzz among voters to sustain momentum. 

“If [Mr. Gandhi] wants to play the victim card, he needs to get the entire opposition to fan out in their respective states. Otherwise, it has every chance to fizzle out,” he says.

And despite the unifying effect, the ruling against Mr. Gandhi and his expulsion from parliament still raise questions about the integrity of India’s institutions. 

Threatening the integrity of India’s institutions

Navika Harshe, an economist in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad, walked alongside Mr. Gandhi for a short span of his unity march last November. The news of his disqualification came as a shock to her.

“There are lakhs [hundreds of thousands] of people whose aspirations he represents. You have just dismissed all of that in one stroke,” she says, adding that the actions against Mr. Gandhi evoke “a sense of dread and fear.”

Some find the ruling unfair. When compared to what other politicians, including BJP leaders, have said, Mr. Gandhi’s remark “is absolutely nothing,” says Mr. Swain, adding that such statements are made every other day in India.

Deepanshu Aggarwal/AP

Supporters of opposition Congress party shout slogans as they protest against Rahul Gandhi's expulsion from Parliament in New Delhi, India, March 27, 2023. Mr. Gandhi was expelled from Parliament a day after a court convicted him of defamation and sentenced him to two years in prison for mocking the surname Modi in a 2019 election speech.

Mr. Gandhi’s disqualification is part of a broader pattern of democratic setbacks, according to the United States-based advocacy group Hindus for Human Rights.

“This comes at the end of a week of anti-democratic actions taken by the Indian government, including a massive internet shutdown in Punjab and the strengthening of the draconian [anti-terrorism] law,” Nikhil Mandalaparthy, the deputy executive director of Hindus for Human Rights told The Christian Science Monitor in a text message. “In recent years, the Indian government has cracked down against any voices of dissent in the country, including students, academics, human rights defenders, and politicians from opposition parties.” 

Indeed, Mr. Gandhi had emerged as one of the prime minister’s most relentless critics, questioning him in parliament about the government’s ties to billionaire Gautam Adani, who was accused of fraud earlier this year. 

But the BJP denies that the case was politically motivated. “The law has done its job, the BJP had nothing to do with it,” says spokesperson Khemchand Sharma. “First they defame and now they are spreading misinformation. [The Congress] won’t get any sympathy from the public.” 

On Tuesday, Mr. Modi addressed the opposition backlash, saying “Conspiracies are being hatched to end the credibility of our institutions” and to undercut the BJP’s efforts to weed out corruption.

Mr. Gandhi was sentenced to two years for the defamation case, effective late April. That’s the minimum sentence required to trigger a parliamentary expulsion, per Indian law, though reports suggest the law is implemented inconsistently.

Ms. Harshe, the Congress supporter, says she has faith in the integrity of India’s judiciary and is hopeful of Mr. Gandhi’s return to parliament. For his part, Mr. Gandhi has vowed to “keep fighting for India’s democracy” and questioning Mr. Modi, whether he’s reinstated as a member of Parliament or not. Next week he will kick off a nationwide protest called the “Satyamev Jayate” agitation – which translates to “truth alone triumphs” and is also India’s national motto – in Kolar, Karnataka, the same place he made the controversial Modi comment.

Late last week, a powerful tornado tore through parts of the rural American South. The EF4 storm system, which spanned some 170 miles, killed an estimated 22 people in Mississippi and Alabama. Local officials across the region reported dozens more injuries in the days after.

The rural Mississippi Delta community of Rolling Fork, a town of less than 2,000 in Sharkey County, suffered the bulk of the damage. Wind speeds soared to 170 miles per hour and the funnel stretched an estimated three-fourths of a mile wide. Touchdown lasted more than an hour. 

Many of the area’s structures were razed in the event, as were parts of Silver City in Issaquena County. State officials say eight counties are still suffering some type of power outage nearly a week after the storm’s initial touchdown. Much of the area remains without power, according to local officials.  

The tornado’s aftermath has prompted an influx of help at a time of need. But experts and officials say the region faces a long road to recovery that will call for both local commitment and outside funding.

What help is flowing in?

At least 2,000 homes were destroyed in the storm, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. Shelters across the state have been opened for the unhoused. 

President Joe Biden issued an emergency declaration for Mississippi and the surrounding region on Sunday, and plans to visit the state with First Lady Jill Biden on Friday. The declaration allows for federal funding to go toward recovery efforts in the state’s heavily impacted areas. That includes aid for those who lost housing and require temporary accommodations, home repairs, loans for property losses among the uninsured and other programs, the administration said following the emergency declaration’s announcement.

Gov. Tate Reeves also issued a state of emergency order following last week’s storm. The Republican governor has pledged to rebuild heavily impacted areas in the region, including the state’s agricultural sector. The Mississippi Delta region is home to much of the state’s corn and soybean crops, as well as most of the nation’s farm-raised catfish.

Meanwhile, private citizens and the private and nonprofit sectors are combining forces to deliver aid to residents – from a Walmart truckload of bottled water and food to Salvation Army supply-distribution efforts.

Is climate change boosting tornado risk?

Scientists say they’re still a distance away from understanding potential connections between climate change and extreme weather conditions that produce tornadoes. 

Still, some recent research finds that the regions in which tornadoes are likeliest to occur has begun to shift from the American Plains and into the Mid-South and Gulf Coast regions, like Mississippi and Louisiana, where late last year the community of Arabi experienced a devastating EF3.  

“We're still trying to figure out what's exactly causing this kind of eastward increase in in frequency,” says Victor Gensini, an extreme weather researcher at Northern Illinois University and one of the authors of a Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society study that predicted a more than 6% increase in supercell events (which can spawn tornadoes) under future global warming levels.

If more tornadoes start occurring east of the Mississippi River, that means their threats are increasingly focused on areas with higher rates of population density.

“There’s more targets for these tornadoes to hit,” Dr. Gensini says.

Julio Cortez/AP

A man, top center, salvages a jacket as he looks over a tornado-damaged home, March 26, 2023, in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. Some climate researchers says tornado risks are rising east of the Mississippi River.

Is the Delta region equipped?  

Mississippi is the nation’s poorest state, with about 1 in 5 of its roughly 3-million-person population living below the federal poverty line.

Rolling Fork’s declining population in recent years has also made it even less equipped to bear a natural disaster’s blow. In 2000, the Census noted a population of about 2,500. By 2020, Rolling Fork’s population had fallen to less than 1,900. The exodus was accelerated by a 2019 flood.

One potential concern in the region is that lower-quality homes – especially mobile homes – are especially at risk. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that in 2021, roughly 1-in-4 tornado fatalities occurred among those taking shelter in a manufactured home.

Advocates are now encouraging the construction of community weather shelters going forward.

Education will also be advantageous for the region as it aligns with new weather threats.

Modern radar technology allows us to “see storm systems that produce tornadoes coming from a long way out,” Dr. Gensini says. “We need people to pay attention when we sound the alarm.”

What will it take to rebuild, especially in low-income areas?

Long term, the recovery process is only beginning for those living in the region. 

History suggests that, for tornado-torn communities, the rebuilding process often takes years even when outside help is combined with local resolve.

For example, survivors now awaiting home repair funding may be forced to wait up to two years, according to the St. Bernard Project, a disaster relief advocacy group that formed in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath in southeast Louisiana to help local survivors navigate the recovery process.

FEMA lacks the means to offer full rebuilding funds for uninsured or under-insured residents in disaster zones.

Joplin, Missouri, stands as testament that communities can successfully rebuild. After a devastating 2011 tornado Joplin residents drew plans for a new town, rallied together, and drew on their own resources and nonprofit support. But it took three years and beyond. In Mayfield, Kentucky, more than a year after a destructive tornado, a $52 million relief fund filled by donations hasn’t enabled rapid recovery. Some homes have been rebuilt and others haven’t.

For now, those in Rolling Fork without means for repairs are left to live in damaged homes, with friends, or with family, or risk becoming homeless as they await housing alternatives, like a FEMA trailer, says Reese May, the St. Bernard Project’s chief strategy and innovation officer. Meanwhile, “their home damage worsens, and they rapidly lose home equity.”

“The administration should use technology to make good on its promise to support low-income communities and communities of color,” Mr. May adds. “There isn’t a community that needs it more than Rolling Fork.” 

Oded Balilty/AP

Demonstrators wear masks and wave Israeli flags in Tel Aviv during a protest against plans by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to overhaul the judicial system on March 28, 2023. Mr. Netanyahu said Monday he was freezing the plan to give time to seek a compromise with his opponents.

There was a time, not long ago, when Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could confidently bask in supporters’ chants of “melech Yisrael” – king of Israel.

Yet this week, facing protests unprecedented in the country’s 75-year history, he was forced into an uncharacteristic retreat – over planned judicial reforms that would strip the Supreme Court of its role as a check on executive power.

Mr. Netanyahu has now “paused,” though not abandoned, that effort.

But it’s not just his judicial plans that have taken a hit, both inside Israel and from key democratic allies, including America.

Also tarnished, polls suggest, has been his brand of politics: the strongman populism through which he has not only won elections, but also made his own personality and leadership seem synonymous with Israel’s security, stability, and influence in the wider world.

And that’s a shift that may not be limited to Israel.

Something similar seems to be happening in two major U.S.-allied countries in Europe, France and Turkey, where Presidents Emmanuel Macron and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are seeing their status and authority questioned.

There, too, specific policy controversies have prompted wider doubts about entrenched political leaders – the power they wield, their style of governance, and the direction in which they are taking their countries.

That’s certainly been the case in Israel, where the judicial reform plan touched off broader alarm among many Israelis about how and where Mr. Netanyahu was leading the country.

The judicial changes were always going to prove controversial. Israel has a single legislative chamber and no written constitution. The Supreme Court represents the only institutional check on executive power.

Abir Sultan/AP

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a weekly cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem, March 19, 2023. Mr. Netanyahu this week backed down in the face of huge protest demonstrations, agreeing to "pause" controversial planned judicial reforms.

Mr. Netanyahu might have eased through a more limited reform; indeed, some kind of compromise could yet emerge from Mr. Netanyahu’s forced “pause.”

Yet opposition to the plan ended up becoming something like a street revolution because it raised deeper concerns about his rule and about the fractiousness and fragility of Israel’s democracy with him at the helm.

The fractiousness isn’t new. For years, a divide has been widening between largely secular, Western-looking Israelis in coastal cities like Tel Aviv and Haifa, and Orthodox communities in areas including Jerusalem and the West Bank settlements, where there’s a conviction that Israel should be a more explicitly religious state.

These two groups have coexisted essentially by living their own lives on their own terms. Yet even before the judicial plan, concern was growing over the prospect that religion might exert a far greater influence on public policy than at present.

There was widespread unease in many quarters over Mr. Netanyahu’s choice of partners when assembling a parliamentary majority for his latest coalition government. He included a pair of small far-right parties espousing a brand of anti-Arab religious nationalism long viewed as beyond the political pale.

Since the judicial changes were being driven by the far right, they turned that unease into something nearer to alarm.

Many of the citizens who poured into the streets to protest feared that the proposed laws would pave the way for religious restrictions in public spaces, or curtailed rights for Arab citizens, LGBTQ+ people, and other minorities – with the Supreme Court powerless to intervene.

Mr. Netanyahu, himself, emerged looking less like the personal embodiment of Israel’s national interests than a self-interested politician ready to alter the decades-old character and balance of the state in order to maintain his own position.

Christophe Ena/AP

A woman holds a poster mocking French President Emmanuel Macron as a king during a demonstration in Paris, March 28, 2023. Protests are the latest round of nationwide demonstrations and strikes against unpopular pension reforms and Mr. Macron's push to raise France's legal retirement age from 62 to 64.

In France and Turkey, the policy issues and personalities differ. But the concerns being voiced about their powerful leaders, and about their countries’ future course, echo recognizably.

President Macron, unlike Mr. Netanyahu, is an urbanely unapologetic liberal. But he holds an even more formidable position of power. Under a political system designed for – and by – the late Charles de Gaulle, the French president wields ultimate decision-making power.

To an almost regal office, Mr. Macron has brought an almost regal leadership style – not least in pushing through a controversial policy change that has provoked strikes and demonstrations by millions across the country.

The change involves France’s state pension system. Warning that it will be bankrupt within a decade without reform, Mr. Macron is raising the retirement age from 62 to 64.

The anger this has unleashed draws largely on a sense that a long, well-funded retirement is part of the French social contract. But it has been exacerbated by the way the president has enacted the reform. Lacking a working majority in Parliament, he used a provision in the Gaullist constitution allowing him to push it through by decree.

In Turkey, the major catalyst for disaffection with President Erdoğan has been the recent, devastating earthquake. But this has fed into deeper concerns over his 20-year rule – especially the accelerating erosion of judicial independence, and personal freedoms, in recent years.

Mr. Erdoğan, President Macron, and Prime Minister Netanyahu may yet weather such headwinds, drawing on the powers of incumbency and long-honed political skills.

But another common denominator in their situations will still cause them concern: the fact that the pushback they are facing is not driven only by political rivals or seasoned activists.

Notable in all three countries has been the prominent role taken by young people, clearly worried about their countries’ future. That poses a long-term challenge.

When Shirley Chisholm ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1968, she was not nearly as well known as her opponent, civil rights leader James Farmer. In the compelling new biography “Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics,” Anastasia C. Curwood observes that the novelty of a female congressional candidate was reflected in the headline of a New York Times article about the Brooklyn contest: “Farmer and Woman in Lively Bedford-Stuyvesant Race.” 

Chisholm, who had long been politically active in her district and had served a term in the New York State Assembly, was more familiar to her constituents than to the Times. She won the election handily, becoming the first Black woman elected to Congress. She is remembered most for another historic milestone, however: her 1972 bid for the presidency, which made her the first Black candidate for a major party presidential nomination and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party nomination. (Republican Margaret Chase Smith became the first female candidate for a major party nomination in 1964.)

Curwood, a history professor at the University of Kentucky, offers a thorough analysis of Chisholm’s seven terms in Congress and her presidential run. As this is the first comprehensive biography of the politician, the author also covers the early years of the woman she calls a “brilliant strategist, inventive intellectual, and flawed human.” (Feminist author Susan Brownmiller wrote a biography of Chisholm for young readers in 1970, and Chisholm herself authored two memoirs, which Curwood notes “contain gaps and inaccuracies.”)

R. Norman Matheny/The Christian Science Monitor/File

U.S. Rep. Shirley Chisholm, who prided herself on going around the Democratic establishment to win election in 1968, speaks with visitors in her office in 1982. She was the first Black woman elected to Congress.

Chisholm was born in the New York borough of Brooklyn in 1924 to a Barbadian mother and Guyanese father, and she spent six years of her childhood with her grandmother on the Caribbean island before returning to her father and mother in New York City. The eldest of four girls, she thrived under the strict, British-style education she received in Barbados and was opinionated and sure of herself from a young age. Her father encouraged young Shirley’s feistiness, but her mother subscribed to traditional gender roles and in later years didn’t support Chisholm’s political ambitions. After her father’s 1960 death, Chisholm was estranged from most of her family.

Chisholm frequently referred to herself as “unbought and unbossed” for going around New York’s Democratic party machine and its patronage system when she decided to seek office. (The phrase became the title of her first memoir.) According to Curwood, she entered politics because she felt that many residents of her Brooklyn neighborhood, specifically those who were Black, Latino, or poor, were largely ignored by local politicians. Unlike most politicians of the time, she appealed directly to women for votes.

The book can be overly detailed when it comes to its subject’s relationships with political allies and adversaries in New York. Its most stirring chapters cover Chisholm’s run for the presidency, which made her a national figure. The author summarizes the candidacy as “an attempt to win that acknowledged the impossibility of winning.” Chisholm, whom Curwood describes as “ruthlessly pragmatic,” campaigned in states that awarded delegates on a proportional basis. Her hope was to win enough delegates to influence the drafting of the Democratic Party platform and to pressure the eventual nominee, George McGovern, to select a Black running mate and to promise to appoint a woman as secretary of health, education, and welfare and a Native American as secretary of the interior. 

"Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics," by Anastasia C. Curwood, University of North Carolina Press, 472 pp.

By these measures, she was unsuccessful. While her campaign generated excitement – particularly among young people who backed her because of her strong opposition to the Vietnam War – she ultimately won only 2.7% of the vote during primary season, insufficient to exert any real clout at the Miami Beach, Florida, convention.

In the process, too, she angered many Black male leaders, particularly her colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus, who resented that she’d decided to run unilaterally and hadn’t consulted them first. Chisholm had often, in Curwood’s words, “asserted unequivocally that she had experienced more obstacles related to sexism than to racism in her career.” But her relationships with the women’s movement were also fraught. She was bitterly disappointed when white feminist leaders like Betty Friedan and Congresswoman Bella Abzug didn’t formally endorse her presidential bid.

Still, Chisholm succeeded in her broader goal of demonstrating that anyone could run for president and paving the way for future women and minority candidates. 

Curwood has a personal connection to her subject. Her mother volunteered for Chisholm’s presidential campaign, while her father, a journalist, covered it. The book includes a charming photograph of her parents laughing with the candidate in a hotel room on the campaign trail. The author clearly admires Chisholm. She credits her with a prescient understanding of the need to form coalitions to fight racism and sexism, writing that Chisholm “was practicing intersectionality” before the term was coined. But she acknowledges that Chisholm could be self-aggrandizing and opportunistic.

In the end, Chisholm emerges as a complex figure whose significance is more symbolic than tied to any legislative accomplishment. Her most noteworthy achievement in Congress was her role in crafting legislation that increased the minimum wage and included agricultural and domestic workers in its protections. President Richard Nixon reluctantly signed the bill in 1974.

Of course, symbols have power. Chisholm died in 2005 at age 80. Ten years later, President Barack Obama awarded her a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom, saying, “Shirley Chisholm’s example transcends her life.”

Reuters

Ethiopian leaders witness the signing of an agreement between the government and Tigrayan forces in Nairobi, Kenya, Nov. 12, 2022.

Over the past half-century, nearly 50 countries have sought to heal the injustices of an internal conflict through the use of truth commissions. These official panels have no singular design, but they do share some common ingredients: full disclosure of harmful actions; restoration for victims; and a sliding scale of penalties for perpetrators based on their honesty, remorse, and the nature of their crimes. This mix of traditional justice and mercy, called transitional justice, is aimed at societal reconciliation.

Two countries in East Africa are now edging toward their own models of transitional justice. Each in its own way is showing that restoring trust between former foes is essential to reviving democracy. And that starts with humility.

In Sudan, which is Africa’s third-largest country, the military junta that seized power in a coup 17 months ago began talks this week with pro-democracy leaders to ensure the armed forces operate under civilian command. “During our history, the armed forces have supported dictatorial governments, and we want to put an end to that,” coup leader Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan told troops last Sunday.

In neighboring Ethiopia, which is Africa’s second-most populous state, the government launched a nationwide listening tour this month to engage the public on how to unite a society emerging from a devastating two-year civil war. Last week it removed two rebel factions central to that conflict from its list of terrorist groups – a conciliatory move that one minister said was necessary “to end the politics of hatred and evil.”

These fragile first steps stir understandable skepticism. Since seizing power in October 2021, the Sudanese military has racked up scores of human rights abuses attempting to quell nonviolent protests – including mass arrests and the killing of more than 125 demonstrators. Pro-democracy groups remain split over whether to seek a negotiated transition. Those who oppose such a move fear that doing so legitimizes the junta.

The war in Ethiopia killed an estimated 600,000 people. The United Nations and human rights groups like Amnesty International have reported credible evidence of ethnic cleansing and the use of rape and mass starvation as tools of war. No faction to the fighting was found to be immune to such a tactics.

The peace agreement that ended the war in Ethiopia last November was the first to include a new African Union framework for transitional justice. In January, the government published recommendations aimed at seeding a national conversation and will convene roughly 60 public meetings on reconciliation and justice.

That has won the government some cautious goodwill from the international community. A team from the International Monetary Fund arrived in Ethiopia this week to prepare financial support for economic reforms, drought relief, and reconstruction. Visiting the country earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that lasting international support required that Ethiopians acknowledge “the atrocities committed by all parties ... and their commitments to each other” to achieve equitable justice.

That condition reflects a key lesson learned in other post-conflict societies – that reconciliation, as Rwanda President Paul Kagame has said, “was not going to come from outside.” After the 1994 genocide in his country, “We looked each other in the eyes and asked: How do we reconcile and start building? So we had to make a choice. This was the thinking. Forgiving is a process as well as a choice.”

However imperfectly, Ethiopia and Sudan may now be making a similar choice.