“Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to serve in Congress and the first woman to seek the Democratic presidential nomination, died on Saturday night at her home in Ormond Beach, Fla. She was 80. She had suffered several strokes recently, according to a former staff member, William Howard.
Mrs. Chisholm was an outspoken, steely educator-turned-politician who shattered racial and gender barriers as she became a national symbol of liberal politics in the 1960′s and 1970′s. Over the years, she also had a way of making statements that angered the establishment, as in 1974, when she asserted that ‘there is an undercurrent of resistance’ to integration ‘among many blacks in areas of concentrated poverty and discrimination’ — including in her own district in Brooklyn….
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant on Nov. 30, 1924. Her father worked in a factory that made burlap bags, and her mother was a seamstress and domestic worker. They sent their daughter and her three sisters to Barbados, where the children lived with a grandmother until 1934. Mrs. Chisholm later described the relatives she encountered there as ‘a strongly disciplined family unit.’
But she had her own strength, too: ‘Mother always said that even when I was 3, I used to get the 6- and 7-year-old kids on the block and punch them and say, ‘Listen to me.’
Her professors listened to her at Brooklyn College, where she won prizes in debating. Some of them told her she should think about politics as a career.” (Source)
— Chisholm on Wikepedia (This thing has entries on everybody. I wouldn’t be surprised if I winded up in there!)
— Chisholm on the Equal Rights Amendment
— Chisholm in National Women’s Hall of Fame
See other blog entries on Rick James, Ronald Reagan and Superman.
