Shirley Chisholm, who served in the state legislature and then represented New York's 12th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1969 to 1983, was also the first African-American candidate to run for President as part of a major political party. She ran in 1972. Chisholm ran as a member of the Democratic Party. Other African-Americans had run in earlier years; Chisholm was the first to seek to represent one of America's two major parties.

The construction of Chisholm's statue is part of an initiative titled She Built NYC, which aims to erect more public monuments and art works that honor the history of women in New York City. The mayor's office cited a study that found that of the 132 statues in New York's Central Park, one depicts a woman, and that woman is Alice from Alice in Wonderland.

New York City has very few monuments to women at all. In fact, the number is five. One of those, a statue of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, is in a plaza on private property. The other four are on are city-owned property and are these:

• the Joan of Arc Memorial, in Riverside Park
• the Eleanor Roosevelt Monument, also in Riverside Park
• the Gertrude Stein Monument, in Bryant Park
• the Harriet Tubman Monument, on Malcolm X Boulevard
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Chisholm's monument will stand in Prospect Park, in her beloved Brooklyn. Estimated completion date is the end of 2020.

An educator before she was a politician, Chisholm returned to education after her time in Congress, teaching at Mount Holyoke in the 1980s. She died in 2005 and was, in 2015, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.