I AM SHIRLEY CHISHOLM

Mellanie Collins, Artist of sketch

Biograghy courtesy of AfricanAmericans.com

(b. November 20, 1924, Brooklyn, N.Y.), the first African American womanelected to the U.S. Congress and the first to campaign for the presidency,known for her incisive debating style and uncompromising integrity.January 3, 2005- Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress and an outspoken advocate for women and minorities during seven terms in the House, died near Daytona Beach, friends said Sunday. She was 80.

While Chisholm advocated for black civil rights, she regularly took up issues that concerned other people of color such as Native Americansand Spanish-speaking migrants. She also delivered important speeches on the economic and political rights of women and fearlessly criticized the Nixon Administration during the Vietnam War.

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm was the oldest of four girls born to parents who had immigrated from the West Indies, and who barely subsisted on their wages from factory work and housecleaning. When Chisholm was three, her parents, desiring a better life for their daughters, sent Shirley and her sisters to Barbados to be reared by their maternal grandmother. For Chisholm island life seemed like a paradise, and she received an excellent education in Barbados's British school system. At the age of ten Chisholm returned to Brooklyn, where she was an outstanding student. Later, at Brooklyn College, she majored in sociology and joined the debating society, an experience that would influence her cut-and-thrust oratory style. She also served as a volunteer in the Brooklyn chapter of the National Urban League and in theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where she debated minority rights.

In 1949, after graduating from college, Chisholm attended evening classes at Columbia University, earning a master's degree in child education. Meanwhile, she taught at a Harlem nursery school, and later acted assupervisor of the largest nursery school network in New York. It was through administering to hundreds of children, the majority of them African American and Puerto Rican, that Chisholm learned the executive skills that served her so well in the political arena. In 1953, as a key member of the Seventeenth Assembly District Democratic Club, she waged a successful political campaign to elect an eminent black lawyer to the municipal court.

Democratic Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm of New York takes her oath of office.

Chisholm's political career took off in 1964, when she won by a landslide her campaign for the New York State Assembly. As an assemblyperson (1965-1968), she authored legislation that instituted SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge), a program that provided college funding to disadvantaged youths, and successfully introduced a bill that secured unemployment insurance for domestics and day-care providers. In 1968 Chisholm won a seat in the House of Representatives, where she served on a number of committees, including Education and Labor, and campaigned for a higher minimum wage and federal funding for day-care facilities. She also secured federal grants for a number of Brooklyn-based enterprises that benefited disadvantaged communities. In 1972 she became the first African American woman to campaign for the presidency, (The first woman ever to run for president was Victoria Woodhull, in 1872, on the Equal Rights Party platform.) running as "a candidate of the people." In doing so she paved the way for others like herself who, as she said in her autobiography The Good Fight, "will feel themselves as capable of running for high political office as any wealthy, good-looking white male."

Ms. Chisholm is one of the many black women who have been denied their rightful place in the history books.

Fortunately, a young filmmaker named Shola Lynch recently completed a documentary on Ms. Chisholm that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival a few weeks ago. The film, Chisholm '72: Unbought and Unbossed, features interviews with writer Amiri Baraka, feminist Susan Brownmiller and former Black Panther leader Bobby Seale. Ms. Chisholm herself is interviewed, and the archival footage from the 1970s brings her campaign to life.

In reflecting on her defeat in 1972, Ms. Chisholm remarks in the film: "There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price.

"Obscurity is too high a price for Ms. Chisholm to have to pay."