Dr. Margaret Weiss Crouch, Holocaust Educator
Unbossed and Unbowed is a one-woman live show by Ingrid Griffith, who wrote it originally as a biographical book about Shirley Chisholm, memorized it, and performs it solo onstage for two and a half hours. Shirley Chisholm is the first Black woman to run for US President and win a seat in Congress.
The Halina Wind Preston Holocaust Education Committee (HWPHEC) brought this show to Wilmington March 16, 2025. Ingrid Griffith presented a flawless performance about a character whom I knew little about. It was an engaging, interesting, and entertaining way to learn a history lesson in one afternoon.
Shirley Chisholm’s personal and professional journey through US politics reminded me of some similarities of minorities daring to “live” their beliefs as a religious, cultural, economic, and political minority in Germany before and during the Holocaust. For Black people in the US, it was racism. For Jews in Germany, it was antisemitism, which the Nazis spun into racism, calling Jews “the Jewish race.” The Nazi goal was to “purify” the “master” race by eliminating minorities, mainly the Jews.
Unbossed and Unbowed shows how Shirley Chisholm’s heritage of race and gender linked her life to the patriarchal system that made the decisions of US slavery and the Nazi patriarchal system of Hitler and his henchmen. Working periodically in Germany as a Holocaust educator, I think that the present German population seems to have made better progress teaching the lessons of the Holocaust about their perpetrators than some US schools have about our past and present perpetrators of racism toward Black people, no longer calling slavery a history lesson but an economic lesson about how white slave owners acquired free labor and some slaves were glad to have a job.
For me the main connection is the message of the oppressed and the oppressor. The Nazis called the Jews a race, therefore, a racial hatred of a minority. Many slave owners in the US were also racially prejudiced and regarded Black people a minority race so less likely to be noticed if bought, sold, or abused. It’s a lot easier to eliminate “the other” when you can get a majority vote.
Unbossed and Unbowed is an entertaining and educational learning and teaching tool, written and performed as one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.
