Shirley Chisholm of New York was the first Black woman elected to Congress and the first Black American to seek a major party's nomination for president. Born Shirley Anita St. Hilll on November 30, 1924 in New York City, Shirley spent part of her childhood in Barbados with her grandmother. After growing up in Barbados and Bedford-Stuyvescent, she attended Brooklyn College from 1942 to 1946. She earned her degree in education from Brooklyn College in 1946. Her early heroines included such women as Mary McLeod Bethune, Harriet Tubman and Susan B Anthony.
After college, Chisholm became a nursery school teacher and she also earned her master’s degree from Columbia University at the same time. She served as the director of day-care centers in Brownsville and lower Manhattan, and then became a consultant for the Division of Day Care in the New York Office of Children and Family Services. It was this interest in the welfare of young people, combined with the political consciousness sparked in her by her father, that pushed her into the world of public service.
Chisholm spent years painstakingly climbing up the lowest (and most thankless) levels of politics in organizations like the Seventeenth Assembly District Democratic Club. She was a leader in League of Women Voters, National Association for the Advancement for Colored People (NAACP), Urban League and Democratic Party Club in Brooklyn. Shirley was tired of being confronted with the routine marginalization of women in the political process. She was incensed by the idea of White politicians dictating the policies that would impact the lives of majority-Black neighborhoods.
So Shirley sought political power in her own right. She was ready to fight racial and gender inequality in the US and became a community activist through several organizations. Chisholm became interested in politics after she worked as a consultant on child care policy for the City of New York. In 1964, Chisholm ran for and became the second Black American in the New York State Legislature. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. had, in 1945, become the first Black member of Congress. In the New York legislature, she pioneered the SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) program.
After court-ordered redistricting created a new, heavily Democratic, district in her neighborhood, in 1968 Chisholm sought and won a seat in Congress to become the first Black woman in Congress. After initially being assigned to the House Forestry Committee, she shocked many by demanding reassignment. She was placed on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, eventually graduating to the Education and Labor Committee. She became one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1969.
In Congress she quickly became known as a strong liberal who opposed weapons development and the war in Vietnam and favored full-employment proposals. At a tumultuous moment shaped by war, social movements, Chisholm sought to rally a diverse coalition of young people, people of color, women, and other marginalized groups. She also fought for unemployment benefits for domestic workers—a measure which she considered among her proudest achievements. Later, she would also champion this issue in the House of Representatives, sponsoring a bill to ensure minimum wage to domestic workers.
She fought for the Equal Rights Amendment, enlisting women into public service, publicly funded daycare, parental leave, civil rights for Black people, voting rights for all, and women's reproductive freedom. Also, she was deeply concerned with issues of hunger in the United States and throughout the world, lending her influence to the expansion of food stamps. While she began as an icon for the feminist movement in the United States, she increasingly became a voice on global women's issues, paying particular attention to human rights issues that impacted Black women around the globe.
As a candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. president in 1972, she won 152 delegates before withdrawing from the race. In that campaign, she asserted herself as the first Black candidate to run for a major party nomination, and the first woman to run for the Democratic nomination. During her presidential campaign, and especially in the latter half of her Congressional career, Chisholm expanded the focus of her advocacy to international issues. Notably, she championed the rights of Haitian refugees and protesting racist practices and double-standards in U.S. immigration policies.
By the end of her time in public service, Chisholm had become an expert on a wide range of issues and policies. These impacted women, children, migrants, nonwhites and the poor throughout the world. After serving seven terms in the House, Chisholm retired from office to become a teacher and public speaker. She taught at Mount Holyoke College and co-founded the National Political Congress of Black Women. People often call her "Fighting Shirley Chisholm" because she works hard to make changes for women, Blacks, the poor and powerless.
After leaving Congress in 1982, she continued her career as an educator, this time as a professor at Mt. Holyoke College. There she taught courses in sociology and political science. She visited colleges and universities throughout the country, seeking to protect the Civil Rights legacy from conservative ascendancy of the 1980s, educate on women in politics and international women's issues, and empower minority youth to participate in the political process. Shirley Chisholm was also a prominent supporter and campaigner for both of Jesse Jackson's bids for the presidency. Although nominated for the ambassadorship to Jamaica in 1993, health issues caused her to withdraw. In 2015, Chisholm was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.