Clear-sighted, well-spoken, and feisty, Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm
was the first black woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress.
Early life
Shirley Chisholm was born on November 30, 1924. Her parents were
immigrants to the United States. Her father, Charles St. Hill, was a factory worker from British Guiana; her mother, Ruby (Seale) St. Hill, was
a seamstress from Barbados. The young couple had a hard time making
ends meet, and in the hopes of saving some of their sparse earnings, they
sent their children back to the Caribbean. When Shirley was three, she
and her two younger sisters, Muriel and Odessa, went to live with their
grandmother in Barbados, where they stayed for seven years.
Education on the island was extremely thorough. Chisholm was far
ahead of other students when she returned to New York at the age of ten.
An outstanding student, she was offered scholarships to Vassar and
Oberlin colleges when she graduated from high school. She enrolled at
Brooklyn College, which was less costly.
Introduced to local politics
At Brooklyn College in the 1940s, Chisholm majored in sociology and
planned to become a teacher, since at that time teaching was one of the
few professions open to black women. She graduated with honors in
1946, and taught nursery school while studying for a master’s degree in
elementary education at Columbia University. During these years,
Chisholm joined the Harriet Tubman Society and began actively participating in the movement to end oppression and to promote black racial
consciousness and pride. In 1949, she married fellow Columbia student
Conrad Chisholm, and in 1952 she received her master’s degree. While
teaching and working as a New York City education consultant,
Chisholm joined a campaign to get a black lawyer elected as a district
court judge, her first taste of politics.
Taking politics to Washington
In 1960, Chisholm helped form the Unity Democratic Club to get more
black people elected in New York State, and in 1964 Chisholm offered herself as a Democratic candidate for the New York State Assembly.
Despite some opposition, she was chosen as the candidate. Knowing it
would be a battle to win the election, she went all out, speaking on street
corners and in neighborhood halls, talking to Puerto Ricans in Spanish
(which she had learned at college), and successfully winning over the voters, especially the women. Chisholm won by a huge margin.
Chisholm served on the assembly for the next four years, gaining a
reputation as a hardworking, no-nonsense legislator. She introduced
more than fifty bills and was particularly pleased with two of those that
were passed. One of them set up a program called SEEK, which sought
out disadvantaged children in the schools in order to help them get to
college. The other introduced the state’s first unemployment insurance
program for domestic workers.
In 1968, Chisholm decided to run for a seat in the U.S. House of
Representatives. The Republican candidate was popular civil rights
leader James Farmer (1920–1999), and he had far more campaign funds
than she could hope to raise. Undaunted, Chisholm campaigned under
the slogan “Fighting Shirley Chisholm: Unbought and Unbossed” and
was elected to Congress by a landslide.
Concern for the poor and disadvantaged
Chisholm served in the House of Representatives from 1968 to 1983. As
the first black congresswoman, she made it her business to sponsor bills
that helped the poor and disadvantaged and to push for equality for ethnic minorities and for women. Meanwhile, as “fighting Shirley
Chisholm,” she spoke up for the causes she believed in. In her first
speech in the House, she spoke out against the Vietnam War (1954–75).
Running for the presidency
In 1972, Chisholm decided to run as a Democratic candidate in the
presidential election. It was clear from the beginning that she stood no
chance of winning the nomination. She explained her presidential campaign in her 1973 book, The Good Fight, “The mere fact that a black
woman dared to run for President, seriously, not expecting to win but
sincerely trying to, is what it was all about. ‘It can be done.’ That was
what I was trying to say.”
Chisholm retired from Congress in 1983. She then returned to
teaching and taught at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts for
the next four years. She died January 1, 2005, at the age of 80.