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.”