Black Politics in Brooklyn

Retiring Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm bowed out of central Brooklyn politics this winter for the halls of Mount Holyoke College, leaving behind the constituency of American and West Indian blacks whose “mother of the community” she’d been through 14 years of alternating hope and despair. The bitter, often violent campaign of the two state senators vying to succeed her marked the passing of an era; black Brooklyn in effect rejected the fiery yet ultimately accommodationist ...