Below is an excerpt from Chapter One of Juanita Tolliver’s A More Perfect Party: The Night Shirley Chisholm and Diahann Carrol Reshaped Politics, a story of how the first Black woman to star in a network sitcom teamed up with the first Black woman to run for president in order to spark change.
Diahann Carroll knew how to throw a party. On the cool evening of April 29, 1972, Carroll’s estate was bursting with celebrity, exuberance and history in support of the first Black person, and the first woman, to seek the Democratic nomination for president. The Welcome to Hollywood party for the Honorable Shirley Chisholm, U.S. representative of New York, was kicking into high gear.
Carroll’s home was designed with equal parts comfort and elegance, so that visitors felt relaxed but also knew to be extremely careful not to disturb any of the finery. The vaulted, wood-beamed ceilings and the vibrant, plush lounge sofas made the space feel wide open as guests moved through Carroll’s personal retreat which featured a floor-to-ceiling wine cellar, an elevator, a billiard room and a sauna.
After all, this is the Diahann Carroll we’re talking about—the triple threat who first made her name as a singer touring jazz clubs and appearing on primetime television shows like The Ed Sullivan Show. She’s the entertainment icon whom we remember today for her starring role as Dominique Devereaux in Dynasty, who Carroll personally dubbed the first ever “rich, Black bitch” on television. She also starred as the titular character in Julia, a weekly NBC sitcom where she played a widowed nurse and mother navigating a middle-class lifestyle and career. Julia was the first primetime network sitcom starring a Black woman, and was nothing short of groundbreaking.
Shortly after exiting her hit television show, Carroll took up the political charge of supporting Shirley Chisholm’s presidential campaign. She knew what it meant to be a Black woman driving substantive, positive change that resisted social norms and stereotypes. Having carved through the steel of discrimination and structural limitations in the entertainment industry, Carroll saw clear parallels between her career and Chisholm’s political goals.
Authenticity was Shirley Chisholm’s trademark. She was intent on resetting social and political expectations, and forcing people to confront their own biases by showing up as exactly who she was in all spaces—be that in the streets of Brooklyn, the halls of Congress or televised interviews. It’s something that she had been doing for her entire life. As the eldest daughter of immigrants from Barbados and Guyana, Chisholm, then Shirley Anita St. Hill, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where she lived until she was 3. She then spent the next six years of her childhood on a lush farm in Barbados with her two sisters, her maternal grandmother, an aunt, an uncle and a gaggle of cousins. Her childhood on the island left a deep mark on her character, as she learned that education and discipline were pathways to achieving her dreams, and that her Blackness was a source of pride.
[Chisholm] was intent on resetting social and political expectations, and forcing people to confront their own biases by showing up as exactly who she was in all spaces—be that in the streets of Brooklyn, the halls of Congress or televised interviews.
Returning to America in 1934 at 9 years old was a jolt to young Shirley’s system. The Great Depression was raging, her family was receiving public assistance to survive, and her American teachers did not recognize her academic aptitude. However, once the school satiated her advanced academic abilities with additional instruction, she excelled. Her spunk and fearlessness also translated into her professional work years later when she became a teacher after graduating from Brooklyn College in 1946.
When she successfully ran for the New York State Assembly in 1964 and then Congress in 1968, opponents and voters attempted to diminish her skills and leadership abilities by telling her that she “ought to be home…” cooking for her husband, and referring to her as a “little school teacher.” Chisholm responded by winning both elections the best way she knew how—by leaning on her intimate ties to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood and her decade of activism with local organizations to rally women voters across her home turf.
As a woman member of Congress, Chisholm stayed ahead of the curve. She jump-started her first term with legislative proposals that would effectively flip the table altogether. Chisholm sponsored legislation to establish a basic family income, advance racial and gender equity, and abolish the military draft during the Vietnam War. Given her intimate understanding of poverty, and having received public assistance as a child in Brooklyn during the Depression, Chisholm proposed legislation that would provide a comprehensive response to people’s needs. She buttressed a proposal for a basic income of $6,500 for a family of four with proposals for a commission dedicated to consumer protections, the creation of a national network of childcare centers, and tax code modifications that would expand benefits for unmarried people, particularly single parents.
Chisholm’s foresight and her commitment to changing systems in service of all of the American people were central to her work as a congresswoman and served as the crux of her 1972 presidential campaign platform. Her comprehensive approach demonstrated to veterans, students, Black people, Latino people, Asian people, people living with disabilities and people living in poverty that her ideas and her actions could grant them a better way of living.
Without a doubt, it was these ideas and actions that drew Diahann Carroll to Shirley Chisholm. In a quote to the LA Times, Carroll noted, “She’s got some ideas that can turn this country around.”
With every conversation, as champagne glasses clinked in the background, Chisholm was strengthening her coalition.
Diahann Carroll called in her network to help power Chisholm’s campaign and welcome her to tinsel town. Throughout the evening, cultural influencers such as Motown Records founder and musical executive Berry Gordy, revolutionary Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton, Oscar-winning actress Goldie Hawn, and British journalist David Frost flowed into Carroll’s mansion to meet the presidential candidate and socialize among the stars. Carroll leveraged her social capital to create an audience of heavy hitters for Chisholm, and Chisholm had them all enthralled as only she could. She knew that by engaging these figures with Carroll’s support, her reach could expand to their fans across music, film, television and media.
As guests gathered around the black tile pool, the crowd would have easily loomed over Chisholm, who stood at 5-foot-3, as they leaned in closely to hear her every word, and she would not have been the least bit unnerved by it. She was used to attracting and engaging with large groups of people—the antithesis of those politicians who would rather hide out in a quiet back room waiting for a crowd to assemble before delivering a speech or filtering through questions.
Person by person, Chisholm outlined her vision and her platform that prioritized action for the American people. She didn’t shift her tone just because she was in Hollywood. If anything, she doubled down on her forthright mannerisms in front of this crowd. Chisholm’s plea for action and unity struck a chord that reverberated across the crowd of leaders, icons, and stars. She understood that each person at the party—the activists, the political donors, the young people, the media mavens, the feminists and others—each represented a key ingredient of her power-building efforts. With every conversation, as champagne glasses clinked in the background, Chisholm was strengthening her coalition.
Excerpted from the book A MORE PERFECT PARTY: The Night Shirley Chisholm and Diahann Carroll Reshaped Politics by Juanita Tolliver. Copyright © 2025 by Juanita Tolliver. Reprinted with permission of Legacy Lit, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.
