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January 6, 2005
Former Rep. Shirley Chisolm
dead
By Coralie Carlson
Associated Press Writer
January 6, 2005 - MIAMI (AP) — Shirley Chisholm, an advocate
for minority rights who became the first black woman elected to
Congress and later the first black person to seek a major party’s
nomination for the U.S. presidency, has died.
Chisholm, who took her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives
in 1969, was a riveting speaker who often criticized Congress
as being too clubby and unresponsive. An outspoken champion of
women and minorities during seven terms in the House, she also
was a staunch critic of the Vietnam War.
Details of her death on Saturday were not immediately available.
Chisholm ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972,
a campaign that was viewed as more symbolic than practical. She
won 152 delegates before withdrawing from the race.
“I ran for the presidency, despite hopeless odds, to demonstrate
the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo,” Chisholm
said in her book “The Good Fight.” “The next
time a woman runs, or a black, a Jew or anyone from a group that
the country is ‘not ready’ to elect to its highest
office, I believe that he or she will be taken seriously from
the start.”
The Rev. Jesse Jackson called her a “woman
of great courage.”
“She was an activist and she never stopped fighting,”
Jackson told The Associated Press from Ohio. “She refused
to accept the ordinary, and she had high expectations for herself
and all people around her.”
Newly elected, she was assigned to the House Agriculture Committee,
which she felt was irrelevant to her urban constituency. In an
unheard of move, she demanded reassignment and got switched to
the Veterans Affairs Committee.
Not long afterward she voted for Hale Boggs, who was white, over
John Conyers, who was black, for majority leader. Boggs rewarded
her with a place on the prized Education and Labor Committee and
she was its third ranking member when she left.
“My greatest political asset, which professional politicians
fear, is my mouth, out of which come all kinds of things one shouldn’t
always discuss for reasons of political expediency,” she
told voters.
During her failed presidential bid, Chisholm went to the hospital
to visit George Wallace, her rival candidate and ideological opposite,
after he had been shot — an act that appalled her followers.
“He said, ‘What are your people going to say?’
I said: ‘I know what they’re going to say. But I wouldn’t
want what happened to you to happen to anyone.’ He cried
and cried,” she recalled.
In her book, “Unbought and Unbossed,” she recounted
the campaign that brought her to Congress and wrote of her concerns
about that body:
“Our representative democracy is not working because the
Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond
to their needs. I believe the chief reason for this is that it
is ruled by a small group of old men.”
Born Shirley St. Hill in New York City, on Nov. 30, 1924, she
was the eldest of four daughters of Caribbean immigrants.
She began her professional career as a nursery school teacher,
eventually becoming director of a day care center, and later serving
as an educational consultant with the city’s child care
department. She became active in local Democratic politics and
ran successfully for the state Assembly in 1964.
After leaving Congress, Chisholm was named to the Purington Chair
at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where
she taught for four years. In later years she was a sought-after
speaker on the lecture circuit.
Chisholm was married twice. Her 1949 marriage to Conrad Chisholm
ended in divorce in February, 1977. Later that year she wed Arthur
Hardwick, Jr., who died in 1986. She had no children.
Once discussing what her legacy might be, Shirley Chisholm commented,
“I’d like them to say that Shirley Chisholm had guts.
That’s how I’d like to be remembered.”
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