On March 7, 1965, state troopers on horseback beat 600 marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. The footage shook the country. Three years later, a Black woman from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, won a seat in Congress on a shoestring budget and a force-of-nature slogan: Unbossed and Unbought.
Her name was Shirley Chisholm. And she has more daughters in hip-hop than most people realize.
The Year Before Hip-Hop
In 1972, Shirley Chisholm ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. She didn’t win. She wasn’t supposed to. She ran because somebody had to, because the act of running was itself the message. “I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo,” she wrote. She won 152 delegates. She made every room she entered have to reckon with what they thought they knew about power.
One year later, on August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc threw a back-to-school party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. A few miles north of where Chisholm had built her political base. The same city. The same communities. The same energy of Black New York refusing to stay in the lane they’d been assigned.
Hip-hop wasn’t born in a vacuum. It was born in the aftermath of a movement, in communities that had just watched a Black woman tell the entire Democratic Party: I don’t need your permission.
The First Daughters
When Queen Latifah dropped “Ladies First” in 1989, she wasn’t just making a song. She was making a statement that rhymed with everything Chisholm had said 17 years earlier. The video cut between Latifah in fur and images of apartheid South Africa, Winnie Mandela, and Black liberation movements across the diaspora. This was a 19-year-old woman from Newark telling her audience that hip-hop’s women had a political consciousness, and it was global.
That same era, MC Lyte, the first solo female rapper to release a full-length album, was building a reputation not just as a lyricist but as someone who understood that the microphone was a platform. By the early 90s, Lyte was among the artists lending her voice to Rock the Vote, understanding before most that hip-hop’s audience was the exact constituency political organizers were always trying to reach but never quite could.
And then there was Sister Souljah.
The “Moment” That Wasn’t Just a Moment
In June 1992, Bill Clinton stood at a Rainbow Coalition event, the coalition built by Jesse Jackson, and criticized Sister Souljah by name. He was signaling to moderate white voters that he wasn’t beholden to Black politics. Political consultants named the move a “Sister Souljah moment,” a phrase that entered the permanent lexicon as shorthand for a politician distancing themselves from a constituency they’re taking for granted.
What got buried in that framing: Sister Souljah was a serious political thinker. She had organized with Public Enemy. She had spoken at Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. She had written and thought deeply about Black America’s relationship to both parties. Clinton didn’t just score a talking point off her name. He used a Black woman as political furniture to reassure white voters, and then her name became synonymous with that maneuver forever.
If that isn’t a Chisholm story, I don’t know what is. The unbossed, the unbought, repurposed as a prop by the very people who should have been listening.
The Through-Line That Never Broke
Lauryn Hill’s “Everything Is Everything” (1998) closed The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill with a record spinning on a turntable shaped like the Earth, voting imagery woven deliberately through the video. She wasn’t being subtle. Missy Elliott spent the 2000s as one of the culture’s most commercially powerful women while never losing the sharpness of her social commentary. Rapsody’s Laila’s Wisdom (2017) was nominated for the Grammy for Best Rap Album, an album dense with historical reference, political critique, and the full names of Black women who never got their flowers. The album cover alone was a statement.
In January 2019, Cardi B posted a video about the federal government shutdown, and it went everywhere. “Our country is in a hellhole right now,” she said, talking about federal workers skipping meals, about real families crushed by political theater. It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t from a teleprompter. It reached people that no policy brief or campaign ad ever would, because she was speaking plainly to people who already felt it.
In 2020, Megan Thee Stallion spoke at the Democratic National Convention. That same year, after being shot, she wrote an op-ed for The New York Times titled “Why I Speak Up for Black Women,” connecting her personal experience to the systemic devaluation of Black women’s safety, testimony, and lives. “Protect Black Women” became a rallying cry that crossed generations and platforms in ways most political messaging can only dream about.
And in Chicago, Noname has been doing the slow, unglamorous work: running a book club that puts books in the hands of incarcerated people, speaking plainly about capitalism and state violence, refusing to dress up her politics in palatable packaging. She doesn’t need a major label deal to matter. Chisholm would recognize that logic immediately.
Unbossed and Unbought, Still
The women of hip-hop have been doing political work, real political work, for as long as hip-hop has existed. Registering voters, testifying before Congress, writing op-eds, giving convention speeches, building institutions from the ground up. They’ve done it while being dismissed as too loud, too sexual, too angry, too everything that keeps people from taking them seriously as political actors.
Shirley Chisholm knew that combination of dismissals intimately. She ran 152 delegates worth of a presidential campaign and spent the rest of her life being reduced to a symbol while her actual politics were softened and simplified for easy consumption. She died on January 1, 2005. The culture was already in the middle of the most politically charged decade in hip-hop history, and the women were already there, in it, doing the work.
The line from Chisholm’s 1972 campaign to Queen Latifah’s 1989 video to Megan Thee Stallion’s 2020 op-ed is not a metaphor. It is a direct transmission of political energy across generations, carried primarily by Black women who understood that culture and politics were never separate things to begin with.
We talk about hip-hop’s political legacy like it belongs to a handful of male MCs who name-dropped a candidate or headlined a rally. That’s an incomplete story, and we know better.
The question for Women’s History Month isn’t whether the women of hip-hop have been political enough. The question is: when are we going to build a politics that is worthy of them?
