Shirley Chisholm

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.