When There Was No Chair: The Courage to Show Up - Hardcover

You know what it's like to walk into a room that wasn't built for you - to be the first, the only, or the one they never saw coming, and to find that no chair was saved with your name on it.

You've been talked over in the meeting. Passed over for the seat. Told, in a hundred quiet ways, that the table was already full.

Helen Giddings spent a lifetime in those rooms. The first African American executive assistant in Sears' eleven-state Southwest Territory. The first woman to chair the Dallas Black Chamber of Commerce. One of a handful of Black members in a 150-seat Texas House, where she would serve for twenty-six years - and the founder of a business that now operates in airports across Texas.

From corporate boardrooms to the Texas Capitol to the company of Nelson Mandela, she learned a truth that changed everything: belonging is rarely offered. It is earned by those who decide that a place not given can still be made their own.

In When There Was No Chair, Giddings shares the story behind the accomplishments:

• The 2 a.m. prayers no one heard, and the faith that carried her through every room she entered alone.
• The fight against a liquor lobby that hired seventy lobbyists and passed her home address around like a flyer - all so a child could walk to school in safety.
• $1.3 million raised in thirty days to keep the doors of a historically Black college from closing.
• A university built where a city of millions had none, and Black history placed on the grounds of the Texas Capitol for the first time.

This is a memoir for every woman who has ever been underestimated. For the daughter who needs proof that the ceiling isn't where she thinks it is. For anyone who has stood at the edge of a room and wondered whether she belonged in it.

Helen Giddings' life is not the ceiling of what's possible. It's the floor. And if there isn't a chair waiting for you - build one.