Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholmwas an American politician, educator, and author. In 1968, she became the first African American woman elected to the United States Congress, and represented New York's 12th Congressional District for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first major-party black candidate for President of the United States, and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth30 November 1924
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Service is the rent that you pay for room on this earth.
I am and always will be a catalyst for change.
When I die, I want to be remembered as a woman who lived in the twentieth century and who dared to be a catalyst of change. I don't want to be remembered as the first black woman who went to Congress. And I don't even want to be remembered as the first woman who happened to be black to make a bid for the Presidency I want to be remembered as a woman who fought for change in the twentieth century. That's what I want.
I've always met more discrimination being a woman than being Black...men are men.
Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread and deepseated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.
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.
We have never seen health as a right. It has been conceived as a privilege, available only to those who can afford it. This is the real reason the American health care system is in such a scandalous state.
One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine. They think she is anti-male; they even whisper that she's probably a lesbian.
I don’t measure America by its achievement but by its potential.
The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference between open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind that works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politicians.
I was the first American citizen to be elected to Congress in spite of the double drawbacks of being female and having skin darkened by melanin. When you put it that way, it sounds like a foolish reason for fame. In a just and free society it would be foolish. That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black and a woman proves, I think, that our society is not yet either just or free.
America has the laws and the material resources it takes to insure justice for all its people. What it lacks is the heart, the humanity ...
That's what's wrong with the country. There are too many 'good soldiers' accepting too many bad decisions.
That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free.